Spring HR Tech Number of the Day: Hiring apps ‘retired’ by Cisco

7: The number of recruiting, hiring and onboarding applications that Cisco retired after consolidating its talent solutions.

Prior to a recent integration, technology company Cisco relied on one applicant tracking system platform for managing incoming talent, but it had two separate front-end modules–one for executives and one for university hiring–along with a few integrated and non-integrated applications, some paper processes, and a lot of busy work and potential for mistakes. And its legacy ATS platform was limited in scope and quickly becoming obsolete and unreliable.

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That’s where Avature came in, allowing the company to retire seven applications, configure the system to its needs at scale and with flexibility and nuance, and boost the way it sources candidates, said Jeremy Bloom, digital experience leader at Cisco. Bloom spoke during a demo session with Avature at the virtual Spring HR Technology Conference & Exposition, which began Tuesday and continues through Friday. Register here.

Bringing those systems together efficiently was no small feat given Cisco’s volume of recruiting, Bloom said. Even during the pandemic times of 2020, the organization recruited in more than 100 countries, posted nearly 23,000 job requisitions, received close to 1 million applications, scheduled 43,000 interviews and onboarded nearly 10,000 people.

Perhaps best of all, Bloom said, were the “post-transformation results; they were clear and measurable.”

What it means to HR leaders

In the session, titled “Agile Talent Acquisition Platform for the Future of Work: Cisco’s Avature Solution,” HR leaders can get a glimpse of how the product works and can be customized. Avature product marketing specialist Misha Chakrabarti demos the solution, including a new video interview portal that allows managers to see resumes, job information and best practices and provide real-time feedback within the portal, which he says allows customers to provide candidates with “an Amazon experience.”

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They can, for example, create a profile relying on skills from LinkedIn that then would provide recommendations for types of jobs they might be qualified for and suggest events such as meetups or career days. Internal candidate profiles are even more robust, allowing employees to see a “skills analysis” indicating what skills they might be missing for a particular new job. They then can apply for “projects” to boost those skills within the platform, in addition to apply for new jobs, do career pathing, track applications and other tasks.

Recruiters can rely on AI tools to schedule and coordinate interviews as well as use semantic search to find candidates who could be overlooked, rank them using a matching score based on key criteria and perform other tasks, which Chakrabarti described as delegating “the grunt work to the robots.”

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Bloom said Avature’s solution ultimately has added up to more productivity for Cisco’s recruiting team.

“We receive so many applications a day, a week, a year [that] to be able to not only create efficiencies with the way that we manage our workflows and save time and add value for recruiters,” Bloom said, “but also to have Avature find the people within our database that we might not have otherwise find on our own through our old legacy manual search tools and have the system surface them up as recommendations is really fantastic.”

To watch the full session, click here.

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Elizabeth Clarke
Elizabeth Clarke is executive editor of Human Resource Executive. She earned a journalism degree from the University of Florida and then spent more than 25 years as a reporter and editor in South Florida before joining HRE. Elizabeth lives with her family in Palm Beach County. She can be reached at [email protected].