Ideal
Indigo, “the world’s first cultural department store for book lovers,” is an adored and well-respected brand.
As part of Indigo’s corporate identity, they take pride in an elevated employee experience.
Repeatedly ranked among the top 10 in Top Retail Employer Brand lists, it is no surprise that Indigo is flooded with over 2200 online applications every single week.
Indigo approached Ideal as their number of applications continued to climb. With manual resume screening, even the most efficient employers need a strong partner to ensure candidate wait times do not become excessive.
Indigo wanted to use innovative technology to support their immense talent pool.
While other companies may only target the bottom line, Indigo was very clear that they wanted to focus on two key initiatives:
1) Maintaining their excellent candidate experience
2) Continuing to cultivate their award-winning corporate culture
Using artificial intelligence (AI), Ideal helped Indigo reduce cost per hire by 71%, triple their qualified candidates, reduce potential for hiring bias and ultimately improve recruiter efficiency 3.7x.
Applicant overload
Due to their strong employer brand, store managers were inundated with a huge number of applicants. Managers feared they could miss out on strong candidates if candidate wait times began to increase.
Applicant optimization
Each applicant was only being considered for the exact position they applied to. This meant a lot of top candidates that could have filled a similar role or a role at a different location could be missed out on.
Seasonal hiring
Indigo employs over 6,100 people year-round with a substantial influx during the holiday season. According to the National Retail Federation, November and December can represent over 25% of annual sales for retailers.
Multiple positions, languages, and teams
Within their applicant tracking system (ATS), Indigo hires for English and bilingual positions, in many different locations. Store sizes and team sizes also vary.
Decentralized hiring process
Individual Indigo store managers act as hiring managers and juggling both roles can become overwhelming.
Always innovating, Indigo wanted to see where they could streamline their hiring process and automate certain recruiting tasks.
When Indigo looked at how much time individual store managers were spending screening resumes and trying to reach candidates, they knew there had to be a better way.
Ideal identified five key ways to help Indigo succeed:
1. Improve candidate experience
Automatically review every candidate and notify them of their status. Reduce candidate wait times.
2. Increase face-to-face time
Free up store managers’ time to spend building relationships with candidates and cultivating a positive corporate culture.
3. Automate the resume screening process
Completely remove the manual resume screening stage and lower overall cost.
4. Rediscover past candidates
Increase qualified candidates by screening previous candidates who applied to similar roles.
5. Reduce management stress
Automate stressful aspects of the hiring process: resume screening, sifting through past applicants and manual interview coordination.
We would never cut corners on candidate experience. By investing in our candidates we are investing in the long-term success of Indigo.
Our Mission Statement reads, We owe to each other, irrespective of role or position, the same level of respect and caring as we would show to a valued friend.
We believe every candidate should receive personalized service and attention whether they are applying for head office or a seasonal cashier role.
Director of Talent Acquisition, Indigo
Sarah Wilson, Director of Talent Acquisition, and her team at Indigo were eager to try Ideal. At their large scale, they had struggled to find vendors that could manage the mass amounts of resume data they had.
Sarah worked closely with Ideal to ensure seamless integration and collected feedback from her top store managers in various regions.
The focus never veered from optimizing the candidate experience.
I think some people dismiss AI because they think it will hurt their candidate experience,” explains Sarah. “We saw it as an opportunity to further improve ours! Ideal was able to deliver ahead of schedule, during our seasonal hiring, allowing us to put it to the test when we needed it the most.
Director of Talent Acquisition, Indigo Books & Music
Additionally, Sarah was impressed by the seamless integration with their existing ATS, SmartRecruiters.
“We really didn’t want to give our managers another tool to master, so the fact that Ideal could operate within our existing ATS was fantastic.”
Finally, the ability to rediscover previous candidates represented significant cost savings.
“The talent was already there,” Sarah explains, “we just didn’t have the resources to unlock it. Ideal found a way to triple our pace—meaning we could catch the best candidates quickly.”
Within four months of using Ideal, Indigo saw the following results:
Candidate experience is directly linked to quality of hire. Candidates are used to sending in applications to large retailers and never hearing back. We wanted to proactively ensure that wouldn’t happen at Indigo. Ideal helped us decrease candidate wait times, while keeping every single applicant informed.
Director of Talent Acquisition, Indigo
Indigo continues to lead the retail industry with their candidate-centered hiring approach. Ideal is happy to help such a great employer find the talent they depend on.