Background

Heineken, founded in 1864, has grown to become the second leading beer brand in the world, offering more than 300 brands of beer and cider, as well as international quality low-alcohol and non-alcoholic beverages.

Challenges

Heineken was finding it difficult to adapt to the sudden increase in its mass hiring needs due to labor reforms in Mexico in recent years. As a result of these changes, Heineken needed to hire more than twice as many operating workers as employees. This exponential change in the number of vacancies made the manual processes that were being implemented even more difficult to manage.

“We needed a solution that would help us simplify our recruitment process to fill multiple positions in different locations, all with a small team. Our recruiters can't do everything at the same time, and that's why we needed Emi.” Jorge Dávila Martínez, Head of Talent Acquisition at Heineken.

Before finding Emi, Heineken faced the following challenges:

• Adapt to a 150% increase in labor demand due to labor reforms in Mexico.
• Having too long a hiring time at all your locations, resulting in a loss of key talent at the hands of your competitors.
• Having manual processes that did not align with the digital culture of operational candidates.
• Not having access to organizational metrics to inform themselves and make strategic decisions.

Solution

Heineken turned to Emi, the leading automated operational recruitment platform, to address the many challenges they already faced.

The pandemic led to many face-to-face operations being adapted to the digital environment, and Heineken's hiring processes were no exception. With Emi's support, Heineken was able to migrate to platforms that are familiar to candidates, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Now, candidates can submit their applications through Emi's recruitment chatbot, which intelligently collects information and routes it to existing applicant tracking systems (ATS).

This change significantly reduced paperwork, manual processes and the time that candidates historically invested in their application process for vacancies. In addition, thanks to the reduction in the time spent on each candidate, the team was able to scale its operations without the need to duplicate the hiring of human resources personnel. Additionally, considering that the formless application process proved to be so simple and intuitive for digital natives, Heineken experienced an immediate increase in its talent pipeline.

On the other hand, Heineken observed that limiting communication to conventional working hours lengthened the hiring process. The team found that 73% of candidates' conversations with Emi occurred outside of working hours. Without Emi, communication would have relied exclusively on people communicating only during normal business hours.

Heineken didn't just reconsider the early stages of the hiring process. The company took advantage of Emi's direct communication system even in the initial stages of onboarding. The hiring team sent videos and training materials to new employees to help them understand their responsibilities and how to carry them out. This helped reduce the time needed for onboarding the first day and significantly improved the experience for new employees.

Results

Heineken experienced several impressive results after starting to collaborate with Emi, including:

• Reduce time spent on manual recruitment tasks
• Take advantage of information and data from the hiring process from multiple locations.
• Improve the quality of candidates hired for all vacancies.
• Achieve your ambitious coverage goals.

Here's how these changes have impacted the organization:

Reduce time spent on manual recruitment tasks:

By using Emi to optimize each stage of the hiring process, Heineken's talent acquisition team was able to eliminate more than 10,000 hours of its manual workload in 2022. This allowed her to focus on building her employer brand and executing her talent acquisition strategy.

Take advantage of information and data from the multi-site hiring process:

Today, the hiring team can easily visualize the performance of each of their locations. You can gain valuable insights, such as which talent attraction tactics are most effective, which channels generate the most candidates, and at what stage the most candidates leave the process. With this data, Heineken's management team can more efficiently allocate resources to initiatives that prove to be effective and make more accurate forecasts.

Improve the quality of candidates hired for all vacancies:

Thanks to Emi's selection profiles, Heineken recruiters can spend more time cultivating relationships with the best candidates, rather than spending that time trying to find them.

“Emi has helped us to optimize our candidate funnel, reducing a group of more than 200 unqualified candidates to a group of 20 qualified candidates. “- Jorge Dávila Martínez, Head of Talent Acquisition at Heineken.

Not surprisingly, finding qualified candidates more quickly has had other positive effects beyond the hiring process. Heineken has seen a 62.5% reduction in staff turnover year-over-year, attributed (in part) to the team's ability to identify and hire the best candidates for vacancies.

Achieve your ambitious coverage goals:

The Heineken recruitment team had set itself the ambitious goal of achieving a coverage rate of 98% (meaning that only 2% of vacancies remain unfilled). Since implementing EMI, Heineken has been able to maintain an average coverage rate of 98.3%-99% at all its sites, something that was not possible with the manual processes that were used before.