Bank: Associated Bank
Problem: Staffing had become inefficient. It took Associated recruiters almost as much time to hire a teller as a senior vice president.
Solution: Prerecorded phone interviews reduce time to hire.
As the end of 2009 neared, executives at Associated Bank of Green Bay, Wis., were trying to figure out how to keep recruiting staff motivated to find skilled front-office talent amid a dispiriting onslaught of bad news. The bank recorded a $123.4 million net operating loss for the year, during which its chief operating officer quit and its chief executive of six years retired. Associated still needed to repay the $525 million it owed in government-lent Troubled Asset Relief Program money it borrowed a year before to avert calamity from losses brought on by a portfolio of soured loans. To regain profitability, Associated cut expenses and dividends. A "do more with less" mantra prevailed.
Motivating recruiters amid such gloom while dealing with an industry turnover rate in teller and personal banking positions that's notoriously high and constant even in good times was proving daunting because of the workload: Associated must hire about 700 tellers and 200 personal bankers in any given year to manage turnover in front-line positions across the bank's 250 branches. Such numbers are typical across the industry. "Positions like this are never fully staffed," says Jill Zoromski, senior vice president of human resources and director of talent at Associated.
The 11-person recruiting team charged with hiring for these jobs was spending an inordinate amount of time setting up first-round interviews, a mundane clerical task made lengthy by methods endemic to attracting top prospects: Days of voice mail message "phone tag" typically result from trying to schedule interviews with high-quality candidates who are often already employed or actively interviewing. This is problematic because the longer it takes to set up interviews, the greater the chance the recruiter will lose the best prospects.
"People with these skill sets have options at a lot of employers, not just at other banks," Zoromski says. "The good ones get snapped up pretty fast."
Thinking about how she could tap top talent quicker, Zoromski relayed a pitch about an automated phone-based job-applicant screening system that the Milwaukee entrepreneur and HarQen co-founder Kelly Fitzsimmons mentioned to her years before. Fitzsimmons had repurposed software that recorded listener-generated jokes for radio stations to power an automated interview product, now called Voice Advantage, which in February 2010 Associated signed a contract to use.
Voice Advantage is designed to more quickly screen out undesired job applicants from those an employer wants to interview in person by deploying automated, phone-based question-and-answer sessions, where potential employees are recorded verbally answering prerecorded questions over the phone. Applicants are prompted to record their interviews in subsequent phone calls via "Interview Now!" links placed on career sites or sent in emails. Questions are structured to enable recruiters to quickly weed out unqualified applicants based on their recorded responses. Queries requiring descriptive verbal answers help users determine if minimum qualifications are met.
Associated uses Voice Advantage to ask candidates to describe steps they've taken to reconcile a short or overbalanced cash drawer. Misbalances, although they should be infrequent, are inevitable for most cashiers with experience. So recruiters listen for teller candidates who specify a thorough, logical, step-by-step process they say they've taken to solve such problems. The recorded voices help the bank choose candidates with friendly, energized demeanors who are also clear communicators.
Voice Advantage has enabled Associated to shorten to three days the average time recruiters spend getting good prospects in front of hiring managers from the six to 10 days it took before, Zoromski says. And it only requires a recruiting staff of six, versus the 11 it took before, she says. Recruiters complete 119 phone screens of tellers and personal bankers per day on average, compared with the seven or eight they could finish daily when scheduling live phone screenings. "Recruiters focus their time now assessing candidates instead of setting up interviews," Zoromski says.
Associated's recruitment outsourcer Yoh has started using the solution to screen candidates invited to attend mass interview events aimed at hiring 30 new tellers in a single day. The bank recently applied Voice Advantage to recruiting call center staff, as well. Solutions similar to Voice Advantage include SayHired and InterviewStream; the latter adds Web cam video to the mix. Streamlining hiring isn't the only achievement Associated can claim. The bank regained profitability last year and paid back its Tarp debt in full on Sept. 14, 2011. The $22 billion-asset bank with 5,000 employees also became the largest bank headquartered in Wisconsin on July 5, 2011, when Bank of Montreal completed its acquisition of Marshall & Ilsley of Milwaukee.
