In late March, CVS set the goal of remotely hiring 50,000 new employees. Jeffrey Lackey, the VP of talent acquisition at CVS, knew the demand and need to support their front line workers were of paramount importance for not only the company but the communities it serves. In terms of scale, CVS’ goal represented an increase to the size of its workforce by 25%.
Two months into the initiative, the stats speak for themselves: “the company has received more than 1.3 million applications and has more than 60,000 candidates hired or in the hiring process. In a normal month that last number would be closer to 10,000, according to a CVS Health spokesperson, indicating that the recruiting function was almost six times more productive than it is normally.”
How has CVS increased hiring productivity so rapidly?
- Partnership hiring: CVS’ talent acquisition team, starting with Marriott and Hilton, and expanding to over 60 partners, created a talent pool of recently furloughed workers who would be able to work on CVS’ frontlines.
- As Lackey noted they created ‘competency parallels’ to effectively redeploy someone who used to work at the front desk of a hotel to working in a store or warehouse.
- Moving rapidly to a completely virtual hiring process, which involved using an existing recruiting technology base that had been building over many years to expand to virtual career fairs, virtual job tryouts, and virtual interviews.
- In short, as Lackey summarized, “We went to virtual almost overnight,” Lackey said. “We have something that would normally take a large corporation months, years potentially. […] In 48 hours, we created an accelerated hiring process.”
What do you think other large enterprises can learn from the efficiency and scale of CVS’ rapid deployment of a virtual hiring process that has led to tangible hiring success?
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