Customer Spotlight: Jessie Sanchez, Expedia Group

Jessie is a Talent Sourcer at Expedia Group. This month, Jessie is the focus of our Customer Spotlight, in recognition of how she has been using the platform to unlock human potential at her organization.

Jessie Sanchez has been a Talent Sourcer at Expedia Group for just over a year, but has actually been in Talent Acquisition for nearly seven years! She has supported hiring for roles in teams ranging from Talent Acquisition and marketing, to Strategy and Analytics, and most recently Finance and Accounting. Jessie also isn’t new to Beamery. She began her Beamery journey while at Amazon in 2019, and has continued to use the Talent Lifecycle Management platform to elevate her sourcing and recruiting tactics.

Beamery: What is your favorite Beamery feature, and why?

Jessie: This is probably the hardest question to answer, because there are so many features that I love in Beamery!

I love anything I can do in bulk. So whether that's a Campaign or a bulk message, or simple activities like assigning users to myself, assigning steps in a pool or assigning people to a pool, I just love when I can do several tasks at once, and save myself so much time.

Another capability I constantly use is the “push to Workday” or push to ATS functionality.

I use this for the candidates that I want to get into the process very quickly. We have all been a job seeker and I try to put myself in their shoes. Creating a really great, high-touch experience for candidates is a big win, not just for the recruiter: I save the candidate time too, and they just have to go in and complete their profile. That’s it! Having access to these tools feeds into the overall speed and efficiency of the entire hiring process.

B: Describe the main challenges you were facing before having access to Beamery.

J: A challenge for me, and probably not a unique challenge among recruiters, is having to deal with a disconnected Candidate Relationship Management process without having a system that unifies all the information in one place.

You have some candidate conversations happening in Outlook, some in LinkedIn Recruiter, and some in other social media platforms. Before Beamery, it was impossible to get a snapshot of historical candidate data; what has happened with a candidate, where are they now, what communication has happened and when? These are all challenges that we face in this role when you don’t have a tool to bring this information together.

So life before Beamery was very manual. I would have to review candidates in the ATS and move them to each individual step in that system – then email the candidates one at a time when we were ready to screen, advance them forward, or really make any further steps in the candidate process. It was just very manual. You can easily become overwhelmed hunting for information in the ATS. This is one of the primary reasons why Expedia chose to roll Beamery out to their entire TA organization.

It is so important with the work that we do in sourcing and recruiting to have access to these time-saving capabilities.

“Enabling Beamery to synchronize with Outlook and automatically log all of your communication without ever having to toggle between systems and just have it all there is a huge win. It leads to huge time savings, and also creates that transparency and visibility for your other talent partners.”

B: What success metrics are important to you?

J: Expedia focuses on being thoughtful and intentional with our hiring practices, not only to optimize time-to-fill, but more importantly to find the right talent for the right role.

And this goes way beyond bulk actioning. Expedia prioritizes the entire lifecycle of the hiring experience; reducing the time it takes to get a candidate to apply, to interview, and to offer, and ultimately to offer a better candidate experience, and better experience for our hiring managers as well.

Proactive outreach plays such a big role in this lifecycle. If I’m nurturing previous candidates in Beamery, whether that’s a silver medalist or a ‘wrong timing’ candidate, I can quickly resurface them for future openings that might be a better match or the timing might be better.

“Beamery is part of my standard work process.”

B: What are some creative ways you use Beamery?

J: We are often hiring for different levels of financial positions. I like thinking about roles when they’re not even open – I will still proactively reach out to talent to constantly have a pool of candidates ready when the time comes. I leverage my own talent pool in Beamery around financial planning and analysis.

I use different skills tags on the candidates based on their expertise, business case, or other criteria I’ve learned along the way. Doing this allows me to easily resurface these candidates for right-fit roles or guide them to the team who is hiring for this specific skill set.

Let me share a specific example…

A Senior Finance Manager role opened and, because of the automation, bulk capabilities and skill tagging processes I created in Beamery, I was able to immediately identify a slate of candidates to the first round of interviews right away!

I had been in communication with a few people who I proactively reached out to on LinkedIn, nurturing my talent pools. And, by doing this, the entire process was reduced by nearly four weeks. I was fully ready to go as soon as the requisition was open. And we hired somebody and we hit our goal!

“Beamery enables me to be so much more efficient! When I am reviewing and moving applicants through the screening process, I take advantage of Beamery’s bulk actions. I can move, assign, and even email several people in one go, in order to move the process and candidates along more quickly. It not only saves me time, but it also improves the candidate’s experience, too.” 

B: How does diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging play a role in your approach to talent management?

J: You have to be proactively out in the market finding talent to achieve your goals. If Expedia wasn’t already building the infrastructure we needed inside Beamery, we would be behind the curve or not be able to reach these important goals.

It’s extremely important to Expedia that we include a certain percentage of underrepresented individuals in each step of our screening and interview processes, as well as our offer process.

We also have goals around female talent as well. If we just wait for applicants to apply, we're not going to get a diverse pool of applicants that meets this criteria. As Sourcers, we proactively, intentionally and thoughtfully go out into the market to find diverse talent.

We have an “always be sourcing” mentality.

B: How has Expedia used Beamery to support a critical talent initiative?

J: Expedia Group recently hosted our first ever in-person Veterans “Ask Me Anything” event at our Seattle campus. It was a highly visible event celebrating Expedia Group's first ever cohort of transitioning service members who had spent 12 weeks in our veteran program. One of the goals is to place these members into roles and to also highlight Expedia Group as a veteran employer of choice – a critical component of Expedia Group’s overall DE&I initiatives.

“Beamery’s marketing tools turn your everyday talent sourcer or recruiter into marketers who can easily create beautiful marketing material, without any stress!”

With Beamery, we were able to seamlessly create and manage the event end-to-end, including creating the event landing page, sourcing, attracting talent, and building our campaigns. We leveraged existing pools that we had created for the military community to do outreach, plus sourcing through LinkedIn to get registration and attendees.

We then used Campaigns to remind registrants to come to the event. We even used Beamery to track attendance at the live event, and then to enable post-event engagement activities with attendees and non attendees.

We had nearly 90 people attend the event – it was standing room only. Our results were excellent:

• Nearly 2X the average attendance rate for our live events, and well beyond our initial attendance goals we set for this event.
• Nearly 40% of attendees wanted to be contacted by a recruiter.
• 6 people were processed for open roles.

“Due to the simplicity of Beamery’s Events and Campaign features, combined with the passionate Expedia Group employees that led this event, this was the highest attended “Ask Me Anything” event ever at the company!”

Even just a few weeks following the event, our team has been able to get attendees into the interview process for our open roles. And, most importantly, we were able to track all of that success within Beamery!

B: Fun fact about Jessie:

J: Before I got into Talent Acquisition, I played in the Marine Corps band as a military musician. And since I've gotten out of the Marines, I am still a performing saxophone player. I play in several different bands and am very active in that part of my life still.

About the Beamery Customer Spotlight

This program exists to highlight Beamery customers who have mastered the art of “unlocking human potential” through consistent (and smart) use and adoption of the Beamery platform. They use Beamery to take their company to the next level while elevating the talent experience for all candidates. Beyond being a fabulous talent-driven individual, these individuals also represent one or many of the Beamery values: start with why, own the change you seek, act with kindness, communicate openly, make a positive impact.