Addiko Bank

Four years ago, Addiko Bank, a bank with a long history of providing great financial services and hiring top talent, identified some room for even more efficient and effective system as a part of their hiring process and was determined to transform it.

Gathering piles of candidate information and notes into various spreadsheets and documents was no longer good enough and they were looking for a solution that would make their hiring faster and optimize the entire process. This is when they got introduced to TalentLyft, and realized that the tool will help them achieve their goals.

In order to get a better understanding of how such a big player in the financial industry describes working alongside a powerful recruitment software to maximize their success, we spoke to Fran Tigran Vržina, their Group Recruitment & Selection Specialist.

“All the way from the creation of job ads to sharing them and gathering candidates and screening their profile, we handle all that information through Talentlyft. Job applications keep coming in during the entire time that the position is open and in that period we can already start evaluating and moving our candidates through stages. The whole process then becomes faster since we are wasting no time waiting to start the recruitment process for each candidate.”

“Secondly, since we implemented TalentLyft, our work has become much more organized – having all information in one place, we are no longer struggling to find an application or a candidate profile. Everything is transparent and in one place which makes handling a large number of candidates much easier.”

What happened to your productivity?

By implementing a recruitment tool, companies should not only be able to organize their hiring efforts, but also increase the productivity levels of their recruiters and the entire HR department. However, these two often come hand in hand and as our speaker confirms, that is definitely the case in Addiko Bank.

Fran stated: “ When it comes to productivity, I definitely believe that me, and my colleagues included, became more productive at work. As I previously mentioned, with TalentLyft we optimized our entire hiring process which made us faster and more efficient at work. Since before implementing the tool we used to have more traditional hiring practices, it was difficult to store or delete any candidate information systematically.”

As a specific example, Fran mentions the GDPR regulation: “ Especially now – with all GDPR responsibilities that we had to take care of in our work, it became increasingly important to be able to systematically delete candidate information, once their consent expires. Since this process goes automatically in TalentLyft that is definitely how the tool helped us.”

Modernizing the notion of candidate experience

During our conversation with Fran and after seeing the company’s career site, it was quite obvious that Addiko Bank takes candidate experience very seriously.

“To be honest, as soon as we were presented with the possibility of implementing our own Career Site within TalentLyft, we decided to try out all available features and see where this will take us. Besides the obvious part of job posting, we started writing our blog where we created a space to showcase the stories of our employees and their experiences of working at the company. We also published some educational materials for everyone applying for the position at the company.” – says Fran.

Preparing candidates

It is not oftentimes the case that companies decide to create documents for their applicants explaining the entire recruitment process and how to prepare for it. On the contrary, more times we see them surprising their applicants and keeping them in the dark about the upcoming steps of the process. For that reason we asked Fran what was their motivation behind giving their employees this insight into the entire process. Here is what he said:

“When we thought about our candidates we realized that the recruitment process can be a very stressful process for them. There is a lot of uncertainty – are you going to be invited for the next step, what is the next step, what kind of tests or interviews can you expect and so on. We thought of everyone who might have never gone through the selection process because they are young or anyone who experienced some different process in the past. We believe that by publishing this so-called manual, we are helping our clients reduce stress and show us their best self in the selection process. Therefore, our main motivation in this was to increase the candidate experience as much as we can!”

Regular communication

In addition to creating a space where the company prepares all their candidates for what is about to happen when entering their recruitment process, Fran mentioned regular communication as one of the great advantages of implementing TalentLyft.

“Now, we can communicate with multiple candidates at the same time without compromising the quality of the communication. All the way from sending bulk messages with the initial information to all candidates after applying for the position, to the final steps of the recruitment process and scheduling interviews. On the other hand, we can also send out individual messages through the tool to everyone, depending on the nature of the conversation – for instance it can be about scheduling the exact time for an interview or assessment. To sum up, it is easier to find and contact all our candidates.”

Personal approach

Finally, as the conversation with Fran was coming to an end, he gave us some final details on how Addiko Bank plans on keeping candidates in the first place in their future practices. Deepening the relationships with candidates and making them as engaged with your company as possible can be a difficult task and here is how the company plans on moving forward:

“During the past year, we spent some time on mapping the entire candidate journey and we came to some valuable conclusions. This made us think more in the direction of how to create as personalized communication with our candidates as possible, and we decided to start texting them during different stages of their process. We have never experienced something like this before but we are eager to make it work. We believe that by giving our candidates all relevant information timely and directly, we will create a more trustworthy relationship making them feel more involved in their own recruitment process.“

Ultimately, we can see that there is no sign of slowing down for Addiko Bank and their HR department. This means that we can only sit back and watch as they work magic in reconciling technology and the ambition of their team!