Overcoming Challenges in Today’s Job Market: Q&A With Alltran’s Chief People Officer

Debra Auerbach

At Alltran, their motto is “Let’s Solve it Together,” and that holds true for the relationship they’ve built with CareerBuilder over the years. As the job market and recruiting technology have evolved, so has the partnership between the two organizations.

We chatted with Patrick O’Hara, Chief People Officer at Alltran, to learn about the challenges they’ve faced in today’s competitive climate, and how they’ve worked together with CareerBuilder to overcome these obstacles and achieve recruiting and retention success.

CB: Tell us a little bit about Alltran.

PO: Alltran is a family of companies providing revenue cycle management services for large financial institutions, education institutions and health care companies. We have six locations across the U.S., employing around 1,500 people.

CB: What are the most critical roles you recruit for, and how many open roles do you have on average?

PO: The most critical roles we recruit for are our front-line call-center agents – 80-90 percent of our hiring is in the front-line space. These are our agents making and receiving calls.

We are in constant recruiting mode to maintain full staffing to satisfy current needs and support future growth, primarily for the front-line role.

CB: Tell us about your relationship with CareerBuilder.

PO: We’ve had a longstanding relationship with CareerBuilder on the technology side, but we recently expanded that relationship to include all candidate sourcing and recruiting, since CareerBuilder is uniquely positioned to combine services and technology together. We didn’t want a bunch of vendors providing different solutions – so it was a natural fit to streamline our hiring process with CareerBuilder’s sourcing services and technology solutions.

CB: You’ve recently started using our Social Referral offering. How has your experience been so far?

PO: After learning about the solution, it didn’t take long to understand the impact it could have on our business. We believe referrals are the path to recruitment success. We need to empower our people to help us connect with likeminded individuals. Your tool helps us make the referral process super easy and fun for our employees. It allows us to turn our 1,500 employees into recruiters, making it much easier to attract high-quality candidates.  

CB: What kinds of companies are you competing with for talent, and how has that evolved? 

PO: A year ago, I could have given you a list of our main competitors. Today, everyone is a competitor. Right now, we compete against retailers  transportation, shipping, receiving and warehouse companies in addition to the traditional call-centers and collection agencies. In the past, we looked mainly for people with customer service backgrounds, but now we’ve expanded our search to look at candidates with different backgrounds and transferrable skills.

CB: What challenges are you facing recruiting candidates in today’s climate?

PO: In today’s job market, the competition for candidates is at a level we haven’t seen in a long time. It’s a very real challenge to find the volume and quality of people that we need.

Low unemployment levels have reduced the number of qualified candidates for the positions we have available. As a result, we have to expand the scope of candidates we recruit, and identify those that will have the appropriate skill set to be successful with Alltran. This has led us to leverage tools offered by CareerBuilder in addition to other candidate assessment tools to source the best candidates who will thrive in our available roles.

CB: How have these challenges impacted your business?

PO: We were not prepared with the internal recruiting personnel needed to achieve our hiring goals in this challenging market. As a result, we’ve partnered with CareerBuilder to tie services and software together to make sure the right candidates understand the exciting opportunity Alltran offers. This drives better results.

CB: How have you overcome some of these challenges?

PO: We’ve overcome these hiring challenges by being creative in our recruiting and marketing efforts and offering competitive compensation, great benefits, and more flexibility. We’ve also simplified the attraction and interview process to quickly move candidates through the hiring process.

CareerBuilder has been instrumental in helping us navigate these challenges as well. We’ve worked with them to consolidate job titles, and have used CareerBuilder insights to help us attract candidates we were missing previously. We’ve also streamlined our interview process using CareerBuilder solutions.

CareerBuilder has data and insights not previously available to us. Having that data has changed the way we view talent attraction. It’s allowed our business to better communicate to candidates about who we are, what we stand for as a business and why we’re a great place to work. For example, we’ve been sharing compensation – something we’d previously shied away from. Now we are very open and transparent about compensation – and we’ve seen a big change because of it.

CB: What would you say are the biggest successes you’ve had as a result of your relationship with us?

PO: I would call out two main areas of success. First, we’ve been able to limit the net employee loss we were previously experiencing as the available candidate market began to tighten. We’re doing more upfront to ensure that we’re hiring people who want to stay and perform; that’s the true win. This is one of the things I value about the sourcing side of our partnership. CareerBuilder has helped us attract people who want to stay and build their career with Alltran.

I think about where we’d be if we hadn’t worked with you and added additional resources and tools, and it’s clear we’re healthier as a result of the partnership.

Second, we’re trying to make our hiring process better by challenging convention and replacing manual tasks with technology and automation – all of which has helped tremendously. The impossible becomes possible when working with CareerBuilder.  

Need help finding the best candidates? Learn how to become a sourcing pro.

 

 

 

 

Previous Article
The Staffing Resources Group screens candidates faster with CBES
The Staffing Resources Group screens candidates faster with CBES

Read how CareerBuilder Employment Screening helps customers screen candidates faster.

Next Article
Leaving No Stone Unturned: Interview with the Director of Talent Acquisition at Capstone Logistics
Leaving No Stone Unturned: Interview with the Director of Talent Acquisition at Capstone Logistics

Q&A with James Phillips about creative ways his company is recruiting and retaining workers.

×

Hiring? We can help. Get in touch with us today.

First Name
Last Name
Company Name
Phone Number
What are you interested in?
A member of our team will be in touch!
Error - something went wrong!