Powering checkouts in the pandemic with transformation and AI

⇨ Need for more speed, efficiency, and scalability drove a move to launch all modules of SAP SuccessFactors

⇨ Resulting in time-to-fill is down six days, time-to-hire is down two days and advertising spend is down 50%

⇨ Achieves an 85% application conversion rate on up to 1 million applications per year

When you think pandemic, thoughts don’t normally go to doubling your hiring quota, embarking on a technology migration and transforming your HR function. But for Coles Group the need for more speed, efficiency, and scalability drove a move to launch all modules of the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio simultaneously during the panedmic.
Now with all HR processes unified on a single platform, Coles benefits from having a single source of truth for people data that is accurate and available in real time for the entire organization.

Coles Group, is one of Australia’s leading retailers, with an extensive footprint of over 1,800 retail outlets nationally, more than 120,000 team members, more than 8,000 suppliers, and millions of customers coming through its store network and digital platforms every week.

The business environment for Coles dramatically shifted as the public health crisis of the pandemic unfolded, resulting in repeated lockdowns and restrictions. As a neighborhood retailer dependent on in-person interaction to deliver most of its services, Coles found its workforce impacted by the pandemic. Faced with supply chain disruptions, panic buying behaviors by consumers, high employee absenteeism, and increased turnover, Coles urgently needed to step up its volume and pace of hiring to support its customers.

“Around 2020-2021, we started to experience one of the most significant shifts in the employment market we’d ever seen,” Virgo said in a session at SuccessConnect Virtual. “It started to create huge challenges for organizations around the world – around how we attract, retain, and hire talent.”

To meet pressing business demands, Coles doubled its hiring volume from 30,000 to 60,000 people and increased recruitment advertising spend by a factor of three. Its talent acquisition team grew proportionally to manage the increased workload – but then labored under manual transactional activities that slowed processing times. As a result of the huge strain, variability in the candidate and hiring manager experience became noticeable.

Due to the volume of work, Coles looked for ways to evolve its system to create more speed, efficiency, and scalability. With a list of criteria, Coles began to review technology solutions on the market to find one that could support its vision for a new way of working.

“We wanted to reimagine how we recruit for our stores,” Virgo said. “We needed automation and AI to remove a lot of the manual work in our systems. We wanted to create more consistency and uplift the experiences we were giving our candidates and our hiring managers. And ultimately, [the solution] needed to drive commercial benefit for us.”
As a key requirement, the new solution needed to integrate with SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite. In 2020, as part of an organization-wide digital transformation that introduced SAP S/4HANA and SAP Ariba solutions, Coles modernized its HR and payroll processing, replacing a patchwork of outdated systems with SAP SuccessFactors solutions.

Two-Way Integration Ensures Single Source of Truth in Data
To help with the project, Coles chose Phenom, an SAP partner whose AI-powered Intelligent Talent Experience platform provides two-way integration with SAP SuccessFactors solutions. Virgo said the two-way integration “allows us to have a holistic view of the candidates that progress through the process, no matter whether the team is operating in Phenom or SAP SuccessFactors, and it allows SAP SuccessFactors to be our single source of truth.”

There are several key benefits of Phenom’s solution at Coles. One is candidate attraction and engagement, which is achieved primarily through the Coles career site and chatbot. Another is recruiter automation and interview management, which provides automation and process efficiencies from when a job requisition is created in SAP SuccessFactors solutions and replicated into Phenom until a hiring manager chooses a candidate for the job. Once a candidate is chosen, the two-way integration enables the HR team to access the data in SAP SuccessFactors solutions and complete all compliance aspects, such as working rights, contract generation, and onboarding.

The Coles team gains additional efficiencies in its onboarding programs through the application of robotic process automation (RPA) powered by two bots that work in the background: Ashbotty processes the working rights and Usain Bot processes onboarding and manages pending recruits. “They take a lot of the transactional, manual work that we used to have team members doing. It can do that quickly, accurately, and it can do that 24/7 – which is particularly important for us as a seven-days-a-week business,” Virgo said.

AI-Powered Experiences for Candidates and Recruiters
Coles reimagined the candidate experience to launch a modern, tech-enabled career site – which has been chosen as a two-time winner of Australia’s Best Careers Site. The site includes an AI-powered chatbot to guide candidates as they look for information, search relevant job postings, and submit their applications. It also includes Coles’ Expression of Interest, always-on advertising that drives the growth of its talent pool and advances its talent marketing by reducing the need to advertise every role. A Hosted Apply process, facilitated by integrations with Phenom, presents a consistent candidate experience and increases the conversion rate on applications.

Phenom AI Scheduling, a key part of Coles’ hiring experience, enables candidates to book themselves an available interview slot and automates the coordination of hiring team calendars. The new solution provides a fully mobile-enabled experience to meet the demands of candidates for an omni-channel, real-time experience where they can learn, read, and apply for jobs where and when they want.

Inundated by nearly 1 million applications each year to review, Coles also took steps to elevate the recruiter experience and increase the speed and accuracy of candidate screening and job matching. It implemented Phenom Fit Score, an AI-powered feature that assesses a candidate’s suitability for an open role, based on location and optimal travel distances, availability, and working rights; then, assigns a fit score and surfaces the most closely matched candidates to the recruiters. In addition, the new solution empowers in-store managers to collaborate with recruiters to review candidates and make quick hiring decisions with confidence.

Talent Pools Grow with Improvements to Hiring Speed and Efficiency
With the new augmented solution, Coles is experiencing tangible benefits across multiple categories and key metrics for success: time-to-fill is down six days; time-to-hire is down two days, which is impressive considering candidates can book the in-store interview up to two weeks in advance; and advertising spend is down 50%.

Most notably for Coles as a people-centric organization is the development of its talent pool, now numbering 2 million potential candidates. It achieves an 85% application conversion rate on up to 1 million applications per year. Through its commitment to be a safe, inclusive, and diverse workplace, Coles has applied the new solution to provide greater accessibility for more diverse candidates, resulting in an increase of 24% more hiring for people who identify as having a disability.

Virgo said that the talent acquisition team will continue to evolve its solution and assess more opportunities for AI and automation to bring value to the recruitment process. Although these technologies are not cure-alls for every recruitment scenario, they can save recruiting teams precious time and resources to focus on more high-touch interactions further down the recruiting funnel.