Siemens: Scaling its global business through smarter recruiting with Cloud Talent Solution
About Siemens
Siemens aims to shape the future—and has the scale, culture, and know-how to realize its ambitions. The Germany-headquartered industrial manufacturing business operates in more than 120 countries and focuses on electrification, automation, and digitalization. Siemens' extensive portfolio includes industrial production digitalization and automation technologies, diagnostic and therapeutic imaging for healthcare, and building automation and management technologies. All of the organization's solutions are united by the fact they impact the way people live their lives.
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About Jibe
Headquartered in New York and Washington, Jibe provides a recruitment platform that enables companies to attract and hire in-demand talent. More than 300 million candidates have applied for jobs via its platform to date.
With Cloud Talent Solution and Jibe, Siemens has achieved a 30% increase in the conversion of searches to job applications on its career site; offers a more relevant experience to job seekers, reducing the load on its talent acquisition team; and supports the talent acquisition team and broader HR function's journey to becoming a provider of amazing technology-based solutions to employees and candidates.
Google Cloud Results
- Provides a better experience for global job seekers on the Siemens career site
- Supports Siemens' talent acquisition and HR function's digital journey
- Reduces recruiters' job application processing load
30% global increase in conversion of searches to job applications
Siemens aims to shape the future—and has the scale, culture, and know-how to realize its ambitions. The Germany-headquartered industrial manufacturing business operates in more than 120 countries and focuses on electrification, automation, and digitalization. Siemens' extensive portfolio includes industrial production digitalization and automation technologies, diagnostic and therapeutic imaging for healthcare, and building automation and management technologies.
"All our solutions are united by the fact they impact the way people live their lives," says Stephanie Morton, Siemens' Global Talent Acquisition Manager: Strategy, Technology & Talent Relationship Management.
"'Engineered for life' is one of our brand claims."
Hiring "future makers"
Hiring thinkers, dreamers, and doers hungry to transform businesses, industries, and lives is key to Siemens' success. The business calls its people "future makers" and employs more than 370,000 of them worldwide.
Recruiting for a workforce this size is no easy task. Siemens' global jobs and careers website has about 5,000 open positions at any one time, and the organization receives 2 million applications to fill 35,000 positions per year.
However, by 2017, the website was experiencing problems that hampered the talent acquisition team's efforts to fill roles promptly with the right candidates. Its standard keyword matching technology could not optimize the results provided to job seekers, frustrating potential candidates and increasing the workload for recruiters.
"With Cloud Talent Solution, we saw a 30 percent uplift in candidate conversions from search to application."
—Stephanie Morton, Global Talent Acquisition Manager: Strategy, Technology & Talent Relationship Management, Siemens"We found the language we used about our jobs internally was often not the same language job seekers used," explains Morton. "For example, we may have an engineering position open for our MindSphere cloud-based IoT operating system. We would post this on our jobs and careers website as 'MindSphere engineer.' Unfortunately, a job seeker using more general terms such as 'IoT engineer' may miss this advertisement."
In addition, without intelligence and context, the keyword matching technology could not determine job seeker search intentions from misspelled terms. This became more of a problem as job seekers increasingly used mobile devices to conduct searches.
With keyword searches also generating pages and pages of results, job seekers often succumbed to the temptation to apply for every position returned. This left the talent acquisition team drowning in messages and applications.
"We experienced issues around seniority as well—for example, people looking for senior legal roles were receiving irrelevant results for internships or junior roles," says Morton.
Change needed
These problems could not persist for a team charged with continuously improving candidate experiences. The team opened discussions with Jibe, a recruitment platform provider that operated Siemens' external career websites. Jibe had collaborated with Google to integrate Cloud Talent Solution—a solution that uses machine learning to better understand job content and job seeker intent—into its platform." Jibe offered the integrated solution to Siemens as one of its most forward-thinking customers," says Morton.
Morton's team reviewed Cloud Talent Solution and was immediately excited by its potential to quickly make a profound difference in its recruitment activities—without requiring recruiters and other team members to invest considerable time and effort. Cloud Talent Solution could enable the website to understand the broad intent of a job seeker—including synonymous positions—and deliver considerably more relevant results.
"We can authoritatively say Cloud Talent Solution is improving the experience for job seekers; they are conducting more searches, those searches are more effective, and more of them are converting to job applications."
—Stephanie Morton, Global Talent Acquisition Manager: Strategy, Technology & Talent Relationship Management, SiemensAfter Cloud Talent Solution expanded to encompass more than 100 languages—enabling Siemens to offer a consistent experience to candidates from a range of countries and backgrounds—Morton's team gave Jibe and Google the green light to proceed.
"We had two key issues to address during the implementation," says Morton. "The first was to make sure Google Cloud was aware of any Siemens-specific recruitment terms. For example, we have German-language posts that include terms commonly used internally regarding internships and junior positions. We worked closely with our partners to make sure these terms were represented in the algorithm to complement the vast constellation of already-mapped job titles in Cloud Talent Solution."
Siemens also needed to quantify Cloud Talent Solution benefits to sell the service internally within the business and win support to proceed beyond a pilot. "Because Cloud Talent Solution was effectively an invisible layer behind our website, we had to test its impact," says Morton.
A 30 percent uplift
Working with Jibe, Siemens conducted A/B testing. Five percent of candidates in the test group used the keyword-based search experience and 95 percent of candidates the search experience powered by Cloud Talent Solution. The testing accommodated changes in candidate queries over time and context.
"With Cloud Talent Solution, we saw a 30 percent uplift in conversions from search to application," says Morton.
"We can authoritatively say Cloud Talent Solution is improving the experience for job seekers; they are conducting more searches, those searches are more effective, and more of them are converting to job applications," she adds. "Anecdotally, recruiters are seeing fewer applications from job seekers who have applied to long lists of positions returned from search queries."
"Partnering with market-leading providers like Google Cloud can help us stay one step ahead of the competition over the journey."
—Stephanie Morton, Global Talent Acquisition Manager: Strategy, Technology & Talent Relationship Management, SiemensIn the longer term, Siemens plans to monitor the impact of Cloud Talent Solution on metrics such as candidate retention rates and manager satisfaction.
With Cloud Talent Solution well established within the business, Siemens is now working with Google Cloud to add new features—including voice assistants—to enhance the candidate experience. "Helping candidates laser in on the right positions and make successful connections is something we're doing everything we can to make happen," says Morton.
More broadly, Cloud Talent Solution and Jibe are helping Siemens' talent acquisition and the rest of its human resources function build its reputation and execute its strategy. "We are becoming a function driven by delivering amazing technology-based solutions to our employees and our candidates," says Morton. "People within Siemens are very impressed to see human resources leading the way in working with Google Cloud to deliver a solution like this at a global scale."
"The more light-touch exercises like this we can do, the fewer big, expensive, time-consuming initiatives we need to take," she says. "Furthermore, partnering with market-leading providers like Google Cloud can help us stay one step ahead of the competition over the journey."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Siemens
Siemens aims to shape the future—and has the scale, culture, and know-how to realize its ambitions. The Germany-headquartered industrial manufacturing business operates in more than 120 countries and focuses on electrification, automation, and digitalization. Siemens' extensive portfolio includes industrial production digitalization and automation technologies, diagnostic and therapeutic imaging for healthcare, and building automation and management technologies. All of the organization's solutions are united by the fact they impact the way people live their lives.
About Jibe
Headquartered in New York and Washington, Jibe provides a recruitment platform that enables companies to attract and hire in-demand talent. More than 300 million candidates have applied for jobs via its platform to date.