How Zalando Grew A High-Quality Talent Pipeline With Beamery

Zalando first partnered with Beamery in 2018 and has crafted the ideal blueprint for what it means to develop a personalized candidate experience and an overall talent-first community. From the beginning, Zalando’s talent teams were committed to incorporating DE&I into their overall employment strategy, ensuring these components were included across their hiring and recruiting processes. Additionally, Zalando wanted to focus on:

• Increasing recruiter productivity and efficiency 
• Personalizing the talent experience
• Rediscovering untapped talent
• Enhancing applicant quality
• Showcasing the employer brand

Challenges

We are living in a world where HR and Talent professionals are not only essential, but have become business-critical functions. The nature of recruiting is rapidly changing given the impact of the global pandemic over the past two years. The Operating Models of mature Talent Organizations are evolving to deliberately leverage the subject matter expertise of Employer Brand, Talent Marketers, Recruiters and Sourcers, and these teams now need a comprehensive talent solution to help find the right candidate, for the right role, at the right time. This is a significant transformation that has taken the hiring world by storm, and one that Zalando was determined to embrace to ensure they tackled their most pressing challenges:

• Grow a Talent Community fast enough and to a scale an approach to Proactive Recruiting and Pipelining that would result in a significant percentage of the hires for their highest priority roles
• A scalable way to deliver personal outreach to high volume of candidates
• Support for nurturing talent creatively in the communities they are building through the management of curated Events
• Increase diversity by continuing to foster an inclusive and diverse culture within the organization
• Leverage one “source of truth” for all candidate data and increase recruiter efficiency and effectiveness.

“At Zalando, we appreciate all talents joining our various Talent Communities to send them tailored content like for instance: job opportunities, company updates, and exclusive events according to their interest and experience.’. Kerstin Schartner Talent Communities at Zalando

Approach

The Zalando Talent team leveraged Beamery Campaigns and Events to increase engagement rates within their Talent Community and personalize the candidate experience across the entire talent journey. But it’s not just adopting these features that made the difference, it was their passion for relevance that really made their Campaigns a success.

Their team created micro Campaigns designed for smaller, more targeted audiences based on job families and vacancies. Doing so immediately gave Zalando a competitive advantage by allowing Recruiters and Sourcers to tailor personalized messages for candidates in each Campaign. This also enabled Recruiters to capture relevant information about the candidate early in their journey while also identifying which roles the candidate would be best suited for. 

Through a series of Events, their talent team was able to begin attracting outside candidates and bring them into the Beamery system in a way that fueled their existing recruiting efforts. Each micro Event was mapped to an existing business challenge: DE&I, Right-Fit Talent, and Social Relevance. Audiences for each event were very intentional and promoted based on the ideal candidate, yielding an outstanding 58% open rate for these events. This is yet another example of how personalization can dramatically influence the effectiveness of talent campaigns. 

How did they do it?

• Using the Beamery Talent Community to inform audiences about their sustainability and DE&I initiatives directly from the community page. This approach allowed Zalando to begin building diverse, enriched communities from day one. 
• Making sure the speaker at each event aligned with the seniority level of the desired candidate. Their Talent teams were extremely intentional in ensuring relatability throughout these events, and this proved to be successful: they saw an 86% attendance rate! 
• Working cross-functionally with the Employer Brand team, Zalando was able to create more human experiences by delivering personal and intentional candidate outreach via LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social channels. 
• Building qualified Pools of future candidates: Zalando designed a new registration experience that let the recipient opt in to receive information about upcoming events, news, and other happenings. 
• Tapping into Silver, Bronze and Aluminum candidates through use of Beamery Tags, in order to nurture these profiles and ensure they remain connected to the Zalando journey no matter where they are in theirs. 

Outcomes

Using Beamery’s Talent Lifecycle Management solution, Zalando was able to successfully implement and execute a personalized talent recruiting strategy that amplified their current and future workforce – creating nearly 6,000 new contacts in their Talent Community in less than 6 months. The difference was in the detail: 

• Designed specialized Campaigns and Events for smaller, targeted audiences – enriching the intentional nature of each Event. 
• Created Beamery Pages relevant for the intended audience.
• Optimized Email sends through Beamery based on the ideal day of the week – increasing the likelihood of opens. 
• Established a clear call-to-action in the emails to drive engagement – driving more meaningful registrations.