Automation helps Coles Group transform recruiting processes

Supermarket retailer Coles Group may be one of Australia's largest employers, but a confluence of negative factors in 2020-21 put its talent acquisition program under unprecedented strain.

The solution devised by the company was to become the first organisation in the Southern Hemisphere to launch all modules of SAP's SuccessFactors in one go, replacing multiple outdated systems with HR and payroll processing systems powered by AI and automation.

Along with implementing a deep collaboration with talent experience specialist and SAP partner Phenom, Coles Group’s recruitment portal has been transformed into a multi award-winning site that stands as a successful example of how autonomised processes can drive speed, quality and cost improvements through recruitment processes.

The consolidation of Coles’ recruitment and retention functions under SAP SuccessFactors created a single “source of truth” for people data across the group. Information and analysis relating to its 120,000-strong workforce is now available in real time across the organisation, covering 860 supermarkets, a network of liquor stores, its click-and-collect platform, financial services, and nearly 1,000 other assorted retail outlets.

Speaking at SAP’s SuccessConnect Virtual conference, Coles Group Head of Talent Acquisition, Mike Virgo, said negative influences headlined by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting supply chain disruptions had created challenges to attract and retain talent not only for Coles Group, but many large organisations around the world.

In response, Coles doubled its annual hiring volume from 30,000 to 60,000, but its effort to rapidly scale up was hampered by legacy recruitment tools and organisational fragmentation. “We had a lot of manual workflows in our process, which needed a lot of manual intervention,” Virgo said.

“We started to see real inconsistencies in the experiences we were giving our candidates and our hiring managers, which is not particularly great in a competitive environment.”

With nearly one million applications each year to review, the company needed a technology solution able to deliver greater speed, efficiency and scalability.

 “We wanted to reimagine how we recruit for our stores,” Virgo told the conference. “We needed automation and AI to remove a lot of the manual work in our systems. We needed to have something that could integrate with SuccessFactors, which is the core of our HR environment.

“We wanted to create more consistency, and uplift the experiences we were giving our candidates and our hiring managers. And, ultimately, it needed to drive commercial benefit for us.”

An organisation-wide update in 2020 rolled out SAP S/4HANA along with SAP Ariba. A key tentpole was to integrate SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite in full.

Coles Group also chose Phenom to implement its AI-powered Intelligent Talent Experience platform, which provides two-way integration with SAP SuccessFactors.

Virgo told the SuccessConnect conference that two-way integration “allows us to have a holistic view of the candidates that progress through the process, no matter whether the team is operating in Phenom or SAP SuccessFactors, and it allows SAP SuccessFactors to be our single source of truth.”

The Phenom solution helped to drive automation and process efficiencies through Coles’ recruitment processes, including the application of robotic process automation (RPA) via a pair of bots with specific tasks – ‘Ashbotty’ processes working rights, while ‘Usain Bot’ takes care of onboarding and manages pending recruits.

“They take a lot of the transactional, manual work that we used to have team members doing. It can do that quickly, accurately, and it can do that 24/7 – which is particularly important for us as a seven-days-a-week business,” Virgo said.

Coles’ tech-enabled career site now utilises AI to guide candidates through searching roles and lodging applications. This has helped to create a more consistent user experience, and to drive higher conversion on applications.

Coles also implemented the AI-powered Phenom FitScore, which assesses a number of factors to derive a candidate suitability score, surfacing the most closely-matched candidates to recruiters.

“The aim of that is we want to actually fill a lot of our jobs without even having to advertise, because if we can do that, it creates less work for our team,” Virgo said.

Automation of Coles Group’s recruitment processes via SAP SuccessFactors and Phenom delivered key improvements to measures such as time-to-fill and time-to-hire, while recruitment advertising spend is down 50% as Coles is better able to leverage its existing talent pool of up to two million candidates.

Coles has also been able to provide greater accessibility for more diverse candidates, with a 24% increase in hires for people who identify as having a disability.

Implementing more efficient recruitment processes at store level has also allowed Coles’ recruiters to focus extra time and resources on senior or more complex roles.

“I think the important call out is the level of automation you can inject in your process will likely diminish as the seniority, complexity, and requirements of your roles increase,” Virgo said.

“They are likely to be more high-touch, perhaps need more interpretation or judgment calls from your recruiters to identify who the right talent is for your organisation.”