Cisco Innovative Recruitment methods

Filed under: Innovation, Latest Trends in HR, Recruitment Tags: Cisco, Employee Survey, HR Trends, Innovation, Recruitment hrcases @ 9:03 am
In 1995, Cisco, found that despite hiring an average of 1,000 people every three months during the year, the company still had hundreds of
openings. The recruitment pressure further increased the following year, when Cisco hired more than 1,000 employees every quarter. When
Ciscos sales soared, the company planned to double its workforce.
The management realized that it had to adopt innovative recruitment practices to bring in the best people. They adopted the first of its kind
online recruitment called the Friends program. Cisco recruiters also began to target passive job seekers. These were the people who were
content and successful in their existing jobs.
Background
Cisco was founded in 1984 by a group of computer scientists at Stanford, who designed operating software called IOS (Internet Operating
System).
In 1985, the company started a customer support site from where customers could download software. In 1990, Cisco installed a bug report
database in its site. The database contained information about potential software problems to help customers and developers.
By 1991, Ciscos support center was receiving around 3,000 calls a month which increased to 12,000 by 1992. In 1993, Cisco installed an
Internet-based system for large multinational corporate customers. In 1994, Cisco launched Cisco Information Online, a public website which
offered company and product information. By 1995, it introduced applications for selling products or services on its website. This was done
mainly to transfer paper, fax, e-mails and CD-ROM distribution of technical documentations and training materials to the web to save time
for employees, customers and trading partners, besides broadening Ciscos market reach.
In 1996, the company introduced a new Internet initiative, Networked Strategy to leverage its enterprise network to foster interactive
relationships with prospective customers, partners, suppliers and employees. In early 2000, Cisco introduced the Integrated Commerce
Solution (ICS), which provided a dedicated server fully integrated into the customers or resellers intranet and back-end ERP systems.
In mid-2000, Cisco entered into a distribution agreement with FedEx to manage orders and maintain inventory levels in a cost-effective way.
The Cisco City in San Jose, emerged as one of the biggest Internet economy industrial parks with around 13,000 employees.
Cisco believed it required the best people in the industry to remain the Leader.
Recruitment
The company followed a policy of hiring top 10-15% people in the networking industry. This was a mechanism to remain the industry leader.
Its vision statement was, Attracting, growing and retaining great talent is critical to sustaining Ciscos competitive advantage.
The company began to use newer techniques like the build-the-buzz strategy, which was centered on the primary market for its products,
i.e., the Internet.
Ciscos recruiting team identified the candidates whom they felt the company should hire, and then figured out the way those potential
candidates did their job hunting and designed hiring processes to attract them to the company. The recruiters targeted even passive job
seekerspeople who were happy and successful in their current jobs.
Cisco changed the way it wanted advertisements in newspapers. It listed specific job openings and featured its Internet address in its ads and
invited prospective candidates to apply. This helped in directing all job seekers to its website where it could inexpensively post hundreds of
openings and provides information regarding them.
Since most people visited Ciscos website from their jobs, the company could identify their place of work. The company attracted happily
employed people through focus groups. These focus groups targeted senior engineers and marketing professionals in other companies and
found out how they spent their free time. These insights helped the recruiters.
The website also offered features through which applicants could fill their resumes online or create one with the help of Ciscos resume
builder.
The focus groups exercise ensured that a candidate would approach the company if he had been informed by a friend about better
opportunities at Cisco. This led to the launch of the friends program in April 1996. Cisco also organized art fairs, beer festivals and certain
annual events in which people from Silicon Valley participated. These places proved to be very fruitful hunting venues as they attracted
young achievers from various successful infotech companies. Cisco recruiters mingled with the crowd, collected business cards from
prospective candidates and spoke to them informally about their careers.
More than 1,000 Cisco employees volunteered for the Friends program, attracted by the referral fee, which started at $500 and a lottery ticket
for a free trip to Hawaii for each prospect they befriended and who was ultimately hired.
In this program, Cisco employees were matched up with people who approached the company as prospects and who shared similar
backgrounds and skills. The Cisco employees then called the prospects to inform them in their own words about life at the company.
Cisco also found that applicants and recruiters were not totally comfortable with, the time-consuming recruiting process. To speed up the
process, Cisco hired in house headhunters to identify qualified candidates for managers.
It encouraged internal referrals for recruitment through a program called Amazing People. This facilitated the employees to refer their
friends and acquaintances for positions within Cisco. Employees earned a referral bonus if the company hired the person they referred. After
streamlining its recruitment policies in 1996, Cisco conducted an Employee survey to find out how the new recruits felt on their first day at
work.
This exercise stemmed from the companys belief that new employees typically treated the first day as the most important eight hours in the
world. Cisco launched Fast Start, an employee orientation initiative. It installed software, which tracked the hiring process and alerted the
team about the new recruits arrival. As a result, every new recruit started with a fully functional workspace and a whole day of training in
desktop tools.
Fast Start not only eliminated all problems but it also enabled new recruits to know about life inside the company. Every new recruit was
assigned a buddy who clarified all doubts and answered questions about Cisco. New recruits also had a two-day course called the Cisco
Business Essentials, which covered companys history and business units. The managers of the new recruits received an automatically
generated e-mail two weeks after their new recruit arrival. It reminded them to review their departmental initiatives and personal goals.
Reaping the Benefits
Cisco believed that its new recruitment philosophy should also be made a part of the overall corporate culture. Ciscos job site was recording
around 500,000 hits per month. The company generated a stream of reports about who visited the site. Ciscos hiring cycle also came down
to 45 days. The recruitment costs were also below the industry average. Referral rates at Cisco were twice the industry norm. The retention
rate of the Company had also increased.
Analysts claimed that Ciscos innovative and aggressive recruiting initiatives were to a large extent responsible for the companys expansion
at 40% per year and recruiting 250 employees every week.
Industry observers feel that other players should also modify their recruitment policies to take advantage, like Cisco did.