Delivering enviable talent experiences: A talent journey redesign at DP DHL

Tight labor markets have prompted many employers to re-evaluate the entire experience of how they attract and retain talent to meet demand. A select few — like logistics leader Deutsche Post DHL — are already positioned for success thanks to a proactive approach that unifies the talent experience.

With cutting-edge AI technology that simplifies, personalizes, and automates key interactions among candidates, recruiters, employees, and managers, DP DHL is already making strides in streamlining and optimizing its talent acquisition and management processes.

DHL’s path to enhancing the experience for candidates and their employees

In today’s tight labor market, it’s more critical than ever to make it easy for job seekers to engage with your brand, build a connection, and find best-fit open roles.

For Meredith and her team at DHL, they recognized early on that this all hinges upon the experience every candidate and employee has with their company — and it was up to them to deliver.

“Regardless of COVID, this hiring challenge is getting more and more significant,” Meredith shared. “That’s what drove us to look at how we need to approach recruitment activities differently.”

However, they also realized that this would require much more than an overhaul of their application process. With the world of talent acquisition fundamentally changing, a mindset shift from reactive to proactive recruiting was necessary. They needed to design an amazing experience that offered:

• Simplicity
• Instant, precise personalization
• Consumer-like experiences
• Opportunities for employees

“We started with this idea, ‘What can we learn from sales about how we work with customers?’ We started with a very candidate-centric journey to better market, better manage candidate pipelines, to make experiences more personalized,” Meredith explained.

“As we got into that, we realized that candidates externally are starting to have a better experience than our own employees internally. Our vision is [that] we want to be a great place to work for all — regardless of whether you’re just making an inquiry about DHL … or have been with the company for 15 years.”

Three steps to implementing change at DHL

As a large global organization with around 570,000 employees around the world, Meredith reflected on how trying to design a talent experience — and think from both the candidate and employee perspectives — was no simple feat.

Driven by their desire to change and improve their candidate experience, they remained agile and embraced the “self-discovery” process.

The first step? Get a clear understanding of what job seekers and employees experienced throughout their journey.

Mastering the Talent Acquisition funnel

Recognizing that the role of the recruiter has fundamentally changed, Meredith and her team leaned into key marketing principles and strategies to update their candidate and pipeline management.

To start, they looked at the various moments and touchpoints when a candidate (or current employee) first became aware of DHL, or considered working for them — including job boards, rating boards, and their corporate career site. Following every step in the job seeker journey, they discovered fundamental challenges within the experience such as inconsistent job descriptions and application processes. They also discovered opportunities to improve efficiency with AI and automation technology, such as recruiting chatbots.

“You don’t realize that this open market where everyone can put up a job anywhere, what damage that does to your reputation as an employer,” Meredith shared. “It’s all unintentional, but it does happen. We wanted to get a handle on those touchpoints.”

With all of these insights, they had a clear starting point to begin making improvements.

Enhancing DHL’s employer brand with a single, global career site

One of the biggest findings their TA team uncovered during the candidate journey audit was the fact that they had approximately 150 different career sites worldwide.

To streamline the experience, Meredith and her team set out to build a single, new career site that maintained a cohesive, strong brand message, while supporting localized content in multiple languages.

“Our career site was a huge opportunity to position ourselves better as an employer that reflects externally what we experience internally,” Meredith said. “[We want to] make the career site representative of who we are — make it simple, engaging, interesting… really give them honest insight into what we’re about … Connecting people and improving lives is one of our core objectives. This is what we’re all about and important to us.”

To enrich the site with compelling company information, the team captured stories and testimonials from engaged employees and set a new standard for creating copy that was conversational and relevant to job seekers. According to Meredith, they wanted to use the words and visuals candidates want to see, rather than what their team wanted to promote.

In addition to overhauling the content, the career site itself now features industry-leading AI and automation to deliver personalized job and content recommendations based on user information (e.g., resume, experience, skills, location).

“We could do that at the scale that we operate and still maintain the consistency that we’re looking for,” Meredith remarked.

After just six weeks, their new career site produced incredible results.

Not only is the site performing beyond their expectations, but it’s also opening a whole new world of opportunities for them moving forward.

Delivering personalized experiences with a talent experience platform

According to Meredith, bringing their talent experience vision to life wouldn’t have been possible without the right HR technology.

“We did start grabbing at shiny things and think, ‘oh that looks good, that looks good…’” she stated. “It wasn’t until we started the journey of recreating our employer brand position and building the ATS landscape that we realized it’s not about the technology — it is to the extent that the technology has to work and has to be seamless — but it has to be about the experience.”

Fortunately for DHL, they found what they were looking for with Phenom’s Talent Experience Management (TXM) platform.

“The most exciting thing is, having been in HR for 25+ years, finally we don’t have to [spend] hours and hours [in] excel spreadsheets… This tech actually allows us to do this with the click of a button,” she explained.

“It’s a dream that HR is finally able to do this. For the first time we can start talking about this end-to-end candidate and employee experience that is truly seamless and simplified and automated where it needs to be — and delighting both.”

Not only are they able to provide a stickier, more engaged talent experience, they’re also now better positioned to:

• Analyze and translate data to make meaningful decisions
• Proactively position campaigns and capture the talent that they want for the future
• Effectively map the competition, as well as mobility challenges

And the journey isn’t over yet.

“For us, we’re still in the early stages,” Meredith said. “Today we’re doing just the small things. We want to open this up to address potential future challenges around gigs, around expectations for different types of working environments, project-based work, development activities … all of this should be part of the experience that our candidates have. There’s so much more to come.”

For more about DHL, visit their career site. 

To learn more about how Phenom’s AI-powered TXM platform unifies and enhances the experience for your candidates, recruiters, employees, and managers, click here.