Driving a cost-effective, standardized process that decreased the administrative burden on Waste Management’s hiring managers through an outsourced approach
In 2003, Waste Management, one of the largest trash service providers in the country, went shopping for a partner that could truly change the way it recruited and filled high-volume, non-exempt jobs. We knew we needed a solution that could deliver results and fill more than 8,000 positions annually.
Our mission was clear but not easy: remove the administrative burden from the field, reduce the time-to-fill, and improve overall candidate quality while ensuring the program is cost-effective, standardized, and simple. What we didn’t know was that the partnership with PeopleScout would do exactly that and more.
We knew that recruiting for high-volume positions such as driver, mechanic, customer service representative, and laborer was taking our managers about eight hours to hire for each. If we could streamline the process so they spent time only with applicants who were truly qualified for the job, we could redirect their time to more high-impact initiatives that drove dollars to our bottom line. To keep pace with our business growth and staffing, we knew we needed to either add headcount in the field or outsource to a vendor that provided easy-to-use technology, operational excellence, and low cost.
The key in the PeopleScout solution was its technology and high-touch process to source and pre-screen our job seekers and schedule face-to-face appointments between qualified applicants and the Waste Management hiring manager. The flexibility PeopleScout offers by allowing the candidate to apply via the Web or calling a toll-free number was essential for this type of candidate. This will be critical as the labor pool continues to tighten and employers struggle with web-only entry points for candidate flow.
Additionally, prior to an RPO solution, Waste Management was unable to leverage its national employment brand in a consistent way. Job seekers were applying locally rather than through a common, national system that could track the success of recruitment campaigns and leverage national marketing partnerships, such as our significant relationship with NASCAR.
PeopleScout’s process ensures accountability in that Waste Management hiring managers still determine the selection for hire. The RPO provider serves as the conveyor belt of the process by sorting, screening, and scheduling interviews with the hiring manager in a consistent way across Waste Management.
The majority of the time wasted in our previous solution was with our field managers placing ads and talking to candidates who did not meet the minimum qualifications for the job. That is the power of PeopleScout: it ensures that those who fail to qualify don’t get an interview with a hiring manager. Currently, on average, Waste Management hiring managers can make one hire from every two candidates they interview, which has allowed them to concentrate on more essential parts of their business.
There is an endless list of vendors to choose from, but what made PeopleScout stand out was its expertise in high-volume hiring as
well as an understanding of the Waste Management business.
Waste Management is a very decentralized organization with varying degrees of technical aptitude. While real-time access to our recruitment data was always available to our sites through the provider’s technology, it also offered a staffed department in which “one call does it all,” meaning our field managers could get the hiring process rolling by calling that number. A critical success factor we identified was the ability to support varying levels of technical savvy of the end user—both internal hiring managers and external job seekers.
What I hoped for in the partnership were recruiting metrics and benchmarks we had searched for and operated without internally for years. Access to this data has allowed the Waste Management HR executive team to work closely with operations leadership to identify how staffing drives overall profitability. We all knew where the bottlenecks were, and now we have the data to prove it. At any time, PeopleScout data can provide the response-to-hire and interview-to-hire at more than 750 locations across the organization. Additionally, the data can reflect known employment advertising, where the response is coming from, and more importantly, where the hires are coming from. Having this data in a usable format has allowed Waste Management to estimate that we have cut our annual recruitment advertising spend in half since implementing the PeopleScout program.
With the success of the high-volume program for non-exempt hiring, seven new positions were added to the non-exempt solution. Additionally, the building of a full RPO solution to augment internal resources for exempt positions is underway, as is an outsourced exit interview process. We are confident that our strategy of partnering with a proven vendor will allow PeopleScout to do the heavy lifting while allowing internal resources to concentrate on the higher-impact work of satisfying our customers and growing our business.
