How Recruiting Technology Changed the Game for Esurance

Companies who are desperate to attract and retain talent will try every strategy imaginable in order to stand out from their peers. If your company is struggling to recruit workers, take a page out of Esurance’s playbook and try incorporating custom recruiting technology into your processes.

The internet insurance giant recently faced a common predicament many employers are facing: how can a Silicon Valley company compete for tech talent amongst big names like Google and Apple? Granted, not ALL employers have to compete against tech giants, but Esurance’s solution can be adopted by all employers, both big and small.
There are four ways Esurance stands out among its competitors:

1. Providing a unique and compelling associate value proposition,
2. Delivering a simpler and faster candidate experience,
3. Identifying quality talent with skills that mirror top-performing employees, and
4. Building a diverse workforce with unbiased hiring decisions.

By adopting these four innovative strategies, Esurance was able to reduce the time to fill, greatly improve the candidate experience, and vastly decrease its cost-per-hire. So how did the company achieve these results? With recruiting technology, of course! Here’s how you can follow in Esurance’s footsteps and recruit top talent in no time.

Define a Compelling EVP/AVP

You’ve probably heard of an employee value proposition (EVP) before, but Esurance calls this an associate value proposition (AVP). No matter what you call it, though, you must make it compelling in order to attract the right candidates to your company.
Esurance achieved this by asking current associates why they love working for the company. It found that employees are driven by teamwork, leadership, collaboration, and a passion for customer service. By understanding what drives its employees, Esurance adopted this as its AVP: “Team. Culture. Community. – That’s Life at Esurance.”
While an EVP/AVP is great to bring candidates in the door, your company must follow up on its promises, which is why Esurance actively supports its employees in their involvement in charitable activities. The company offers its employees paid time off to volunteer and also matches employees’ charitable donations.
Once Esurance was able to provide a compelling AVP, it then turned its focus on creating a memorable candidate experience, and as we know, the candidate experience is of great importance.

Deliver a Painless Experience for Candidates

While it’s common for employers to gather regular employee feedback, you don’t often hear many employers soliciting feedback from job candidates. Esurance decided it was time to hear from its candidates firsthand and created a candidate satisfaction survey to determine how it stacked up in the eyes of jobseekers.
The company learned from these surveys that the application process took too long for jobseekers to complete and that it needed to modernize the overall hiring process to include more technology; such as being mobile-friendly and offering quick access to information.
Because so many jobseekers expressed interest in a modernized recruiting process, Esurance started using recruitment technologies that embrace flexible communication and screening, which vastly improved the candidate experience by 36 net promoter score points and decreased cost-per-hire by 41%. Additionally, it achieved a 32-day “time-to-fill” average by implementing technology into the recruiting process.

Use Video Interviews to Simplify the Screening Process

In addition to modernizing the application process, Esurance also adopted a video interviewing strategy to simplify and speed up the screening process for both recruiters and candidates.
Prior to adopting this strategy, Esurance was using a 45-minute, multi-question candidate assessment to screen jobseekers, resulting in a long hiring process that left candidates with a less than optimal experience.  However, once the company integrated its recruitment platform, iCIMS, with video, text, and audio interviewing solution, Montage, it was able to knock the screening process down to just 5 minutes.
Recruiters worked with hiring managers to create prerecorded questions to evaluate candidates against skills possessed by top-performing employees, including verbal communication and empathy for customer challenges. By utilizing this method, Esurance started receiving better quality candidate responses and in turn, this process provided the candidate with more flexibility in completing the assessment.
Not only do video interviews allow for a quicker screening process, it helps employers screen candidates from around the world and can reduce the amount of “in-person” interviews your organization and jobseekers need to have. Video interviews also offer jobseekers flexibility, so they don’t have to take a day off to come into your building for an interview, and can instead interview with recruiters on their lunch break while at their current employer, for example.

Hire Diverse Talent to Attract Diverse Customers

When you hire diverse talent, you’re helping to create a diverse culture, which in turn will help attract diverse candidates, which is why Esurance made it a focus of their recruiting strategy.
“We value diversity, and we just don’t say we’re inclusive, we live it,” says Kristi Robinson, Head of Talent Acquisition (TA) at Esurance—in an iCIMS’ case study. “Our TA team is currently partnering with our Employee Resource Groups to get them involved with helping us recruit top talent. We want to have our passionate associates front and center at our recruiting events.”
Creating Employee Resource Groups doesn’t necessarily require “technology,” yet Esurance found a way to incorporate tech into this process. The company tracks candidates per source via its applicant tracking system (ATS) and pivots when certain groups are not sufficiently represented in recruiting pipelines.
Esurance also uses its ATS to automate job postings to multiple job boards and universities, which helps broaden the candidate pool to a wider span of jobseekers. In addition to job postings, Esurance uses its ATS to help share diverse content from its Employee Resources Group to help engage talent and showcase its diversity efforts.
If you aren’t currently using technology in your recruiting process, what are you waiting for? Not only will you attract talent faster, but you’ll be providing candidates with a great experience. On top of a great experience, you’re also making your recruiters lives easier by saving them from performing mundane tasks. So, take a page out of Esurance’s playbook and adopt a recruiting platform that meets your needs today!