LiveHire and Jemena/Zinfra on innovative talent acquisition

Chief revenue officer at LiveHire, Chris Cooper, sat down with the HR operations manager of Jemena, Fiona Haymes, at #truAustralia Sydney.

The event saw the talent acquisition (TA) community come together for an informative networking seminar. Here, Ms Haymes discussed the steps her company is making in TA and HR.

Jemena/Zinfra build, own and operate gas and electricity assets across eastern and northern Australia. They’re using LiveHire’s recruitment software. Ms Haymes told HR Leader they’ve seen a 25 per cent reduction in their hiring time since utilising LiveHire’s 2-way SMS system.

“The median response time for candidates we contact via LiveHire 2-way SMS is 18 minutes. This means we can act quickly to move them through the recruitment process faster, which in this labour market is a competitive advantage, and is resulting in great feedback from both candidates and hiring managers.”

One of Jemena’s recent talent acquisition initiatives is to involve hiring managers in the recruitment process. Marketing has been used to put a face to the hiring managers which makes recruitment more personal.

Ms Haymes said: “Providing collateral for hiring managers to share these jobs on their socials. It’s creating greater engagement.”

Providing hiring managers with the chance to connect with people you’ve offered jobs to is another great way to foster a healthy workplace for new talent. This constant attention can make new starters feel more confident and valued.

“Invite them to the Christmas party, get them in a truck ride along, get them in to try on their uniform,” said Ms Haymes.

“If they’re ringing up on the Friday asking if they’re still starting on the Monday, that they haven’t received their laptop yet, that’s not a very nice way to start at the organisation.”

Ms Haymes noted that the business has seen challenges in recent years, including managing two companies under one roof, and working towards greater gender diversity: Ms Haymes stated they have an 80/20 ration of men to women. They are also facing a hurdle with their aging workforce as, “The next 5-10 years will create significant retirement challenge,” said Ms Haymes.

One way they’re approaching potential talent shortages is by forming an alumni reserve talent pool, keeping in contact with workers who have moved on to create opportunities for them to come back to Jemena down the road.

“It encourages people to stay with the business, we could rehire them on a casual basis. We can call them in peaks, or during a shutdown, or to pass on knowledge. They may come in once a week and mentor,” Ms Haymes explained.

They were able to utilise their alumni pool when one of their workers left the company and was later asked back due to his skills and knowledge of the business.

“He came back due to boredom. He joined again in the recruitment team as a casual due to his people leader skills. He was able to bring prior knowledge of the business,” she said.

To further combat staffing problems, the company has begun to ramp up their apprentice and graduate programs to attract young talent. Internal focus groups have also been established to find solutions to these problems as Ms Haymes notes: “It’s not a talent acquisition team problem, it’s a shared problem across the business.”

Some of the strategies implemented have been very effective, including their $5,000 referral bonus for employees. This figure was recently increased from $2,000 and with that increase saw referrals doubled for the company. Referred staff must stay with the company for six months for referrers to receive the bonus.

Ms Haymes says the initiative has been great for the company: “It’s a much quicker way to hire and get better employees who stick around longer because they’re referred from those within the business who already know they would be a good fit for our culture.”

Yet another step towards making a happy environment for workers is Jemena’s support for parents. The organisation offers gender-neutral 14-weeks-paid parental leave. This can be taken up to two years after a child’s birth and there is no minimum service requirement to take advantage of this.

These initiatives have all been created and installed following regular employee feedback. As Ms Haymes explained to HR Leader: “We’ve developed a listening strategy which involves surveying at different points in the employee lifecycle and using focus groups to dig into specific issues."

“Recently we’ve introduced a pulse survey to get that feedback more consistently. We let employees know all feedback is welcome, feedback is a gift. It’s important to build a level of trust so people feel they can ask questions,” she said.

Note from the editor: The #tru event took place in Sydney on 14 September and Jemena kindly provided further insights to HR Leader following the event.