In this episode Matt Alder talks to Jennifer Boulanger Head of Global Recruitment at Booking.com
It has become very clear from the research I’ve been doing this year that Talent Acquisition is developing in complexity at the fastest pace we have ever experienced. To be truly successful at recruiting in today’s agile business environment employers needs the right mix of expertise, technology, process and data.
My guest this week is Jennifer Boulanger who is Head of Global Recruitment at Booking.com.
In the interview we discuss:
• The challenges Booking.com have faced recruiting 5000 people in the past year
• Global mobility in tech hiring and the tools and techniques that make it successful
• Applying marketing thinking to Employer Branding
• The journey Booking.com is taking towards data driven Talent Acquisition
Jennifer also discusses the technology Booking.com use to manage recruiting and provide a great candidate experience and shares her thoughts on technology trends for the future
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:53]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. We welcome to episode 31 of the Recruiting Future podcast. It has become clear from all the research I’ve done this year that Talent acquisition is developing in complexity at a faster pace than it ever has in the past. To be successful at recruiting in today’s agile business environment, employers need the right mix of expertise, technology, process and data. My guest this week is Jennifer Boulanger, global head of recruitment@booking.com booking.com have recruited 5,000 people in the last year. And in the interview, Jennifer talks about some of the challenges they face, the technology they use and their journey towards data driven talent acquisition.
Matt Alder [00:01:37]:
Hi everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Future podcast interview. My guest this week is Jennifer Boulanger, head of global recruitment booking.com. Hi Jennifer, how are you?
Jennifer Boulanger [00:01:50]:
Hi Matt. I’m great. How are you doing?
Matt Alder [00:01:52]:
Very good. I hope I pronounced your surname right.
Jennifer Boulanger [00:01:55]:
Got it. Perfect.
Matt Alder [00:01:56]:
Good stuff, good stuff. So could you just sort of introduce yourself to everyone and tell us a little bit about your background and what you now do?
Jennifer Boulanger [00:02:08]:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, as you can tell, I’m not Dutch, so I’m with booking.com and I live in Amsterdam and I lead Global recruitment out of our Amsterdam headquart. So I manage about 80 recruiters and we hired actually this year we’ve hired almost 5,000 people.
Matt Alder [00:02:28]:
Wow.
Jennifer Boulanger [00:02:31]:
Prior to booking, I worked for a startup called Opower. It was an energy efficiency software company that was VC backed and we IPO’d. I guess it was two years ago and Booking recruited me away and moved me to Europe from Washington D.C. area.
Matt Alder [00:02:51]:
5,000 hires in a year. What are some of the challenges that you’ve kind of faced sort of recruiting that sheer amount of people?
Jennifer Boulanger [00:03:01]:
Well, it’s interesting because we recruit like the 5,000 people is varied, I guess I should say the bulk of that is going to be customer service. So Booking insources all of our customer service, like the quality of our service to our customers is the most important thing. And so we hire a lot of people every year that speak 42 languages in 14 locations around the globe. And it’s very hard to hire a lot of quality around that. And we get massive amounts of volume, and there’s a lot of process and work that goes into all of that. I would say the second probably most difficult thing for us to hire would be obviously, technology folks. Our Amsterdam headquarters is where all of the technology team sits. There’s about 1,000 people, and I would say maybe six or seven hundred of them are developers. So our website is. We have massive amounts of data and transactions that happen, and the pieces of our website that interface with customers is just massive. So we recruit about 80% of those people from outside of the Netherlands. And so we have a huge global mobility program and recruiting team that recruits these developers and engineers from all over the world.
Matt Alder [00:04:27]:
That’s really interesting, actually, because I was speaking to a German company a few weeks back who again, were kind of importing tech talent into their location in Germany. What, what’s your approach to do that? What’s your strategy that makes that work?
Jennifer Boulanger [00:04:51]:
The first thing is the technology recruiting team is big. So it’s 25 recruiters. They all sit in Amsterdam, and there are coordinators and sourcers. So they’re broken out into different areas. And we have a lot of volume. We have looked at our data for the past two years, and we know exactly how many interviews, how many resumes, how many phone screens, how many interviews we need to do to make our targets. So we know if we need to hire 50 people, we need to have X number of interviews. So it’s very organized from that perspective, from a sourcing perspective. We do a lot of different things. So obviously we advertise on job boards like everyone else, and we use LinkedIn, we use, indeed, Stack Overflow, but we do a lot of other stuff that’s kind of more. I almost want to call it like grassroots, but, you know, we do blogs, we do hackathons. You know, we go around the globe and attend conferences trying to recruit engineers on the ground. We have a pretty robust graduate recruitment program. So we’re recruiting people to come into the technology organization. Like typically right out of school are one to two years of school, and they do a rotation. So those people that we hire tend to fill some of our developer roles and other roles, data science and things like that. Gosh, what else? We obviously use some agencies, but we’ve actually gotten away from that. We haven’t had an Agency fee in, I want to say, two quarters now because the team’s been really successful with doing it ourselves and building our brand in the community. Speaking of brand, we also have an employment branding person who has done a lot of stuff on the branding front for technology. We’ve been doing a lot of videos and campaigns and marketing to get in front of that talent pool so that they know that booking is a really, you know, it’s a cool company. We’re solving really interesting problems and that Amsterdam is a great place to live.
Matt Alder [00:07:01]:
Come back and talk about the data in a second because I think the whole data driven recruiting thing is very, very interesting. But just to sort of pick up on the employer brand side of it. What have you done to sort of achieve that objective of, you know, branding the company and the location, you know, any sort of particular techniques or things that have worked really well for you?
Jennifer Boulanger [00:07:27]:
Well, the first thing I did was hire a PR person. So my branding person, actually I hired her. She used to work for Whedon and Kennedy, which is actually a PR firm that booking has used for years. And she had no experience with recruitment. So she really brought an interesting angle to the team. And I don’t know, it’s been really fun to work with her because she’s really thinking as a true marketer instead of just, I feel like a lot of employment branding, it’s so focused on the job posting and the career site and things like that. But she’s really thinking about it more of like driving traffic and getting in front of the right audiences and how do we look authentic and how do we show who we really are? She even helped develop our EVP and has just been an amazing add to the team. I actually have to give all credit to her. It has not been me. I just hired a great person.
Matt Alder [00:08:25]:
Well, that’s your job. Very interesting. That’s a really interesting approach actually picking back up on the data driven stuff. Is that data driven talent acquisition, something that goes through everything that you do, how does that manifest itself?
Jennifer Boulanger [00:08:45]:
Well, I’m a little bit in transition mode with some of that. I think the data driven recruitment really comes from probably two jobs ago. I feel like I’ve always worked for these data driven companies. When you work in consulting, I worked for Sapient for about six years and you’re hiring high quality and high volume and you really have to have your data, you have to know everything that’s going on. Because you don’t hire people, you can’t deliver work to your clients. I think I really learned about that back then, even at my last company, it was a big data company as well. I worked for the COO and he was all about what my data was constantly. It was just ingrained into the culture. Everything we did was data driven. It was really logical for me to come to Booking, which is also super data driven when you look at that. The first thing you have to track the data. Getting recruiters to use tools and systems and be process oriented isn’t, isn’t always easy. And with the tech team before I joined, it was great because they were actually managed directly by the engineering team. Their manager was not a recruiter. He had them tracking everything in Google Docs. When I got there, it was actually great because I was like, oh my God, look at all this data. I started figuring out stuff and what was working and what wasn’t and helped develop a little bit of our strategy around that. So I think the rest of the company, we’re moving towards that. We haven’t been as data driven in the other areas of the business and so we’re in process of getting everyone there. So the team, we just put in a new applicant tracking system which will help us track a lot of this data. We had training for the recruiters on being more data driven and sourcing and being a great talent advisor to your hiring manager and lots of stuff. So it’s kind of like retraining and retooling the team and, you know, it takes a little bit of time. I’m actually hoping by the end of 2016 I have like a really clear picture of what it really takes to hire and meet targets at Booking.
Matt Alder [00:11:06]:
So very much kind of going through a transformation process at the moment there.
Jennifer Boulanger [00:11:12]:
Yes.
Matt Alder [00:11:13]:
Cool.
Jennifer Boulanger [00:11:14]:
And it’s underwhelmed.
Matt Alder [00:11:17]:
So in terms of you kind of mentioned some of the sort of technology that you’re using there. There seems to be sort of a plethora of different technology approaches and tools and products on the market for talent acquisition at the moment. Where, where do you think the features sort of heading in that market? Are there any sort of tools and approaches that you’ve got your eye on in terms of using them in the future? How do you think the market’s going to develop?
Jennifer Boulanger [00:11:49]:
Well, I think from a, you know, the best applicant tracking system is the never ending challenge for recruitment. I did purchase Greenhouse. It’s the second time I bought it. I really found it to be the best that I can find on the market so far today. It just provides a lot of data. There’s a. It’s really easy to use. The hiring managers love it. Everything happens within the system and it really tracks all the activity counts and workflows. So you can really look at conversion ratios and metrics and how to drive KPIs for the business and the team. And it’s a great candidate experience too. It’s easy for the candidates. Don’t know that there’s this whole system pushing behind things. It’s smooth and seamless.
Matt Alder [00:12:39]:
What other tools are you looking at? Sort of particularly in the area of data.
Jennifer Boulanger [00:12:43]:
So I’m really looking at tools around sourcing and providing really kind of predictive analytics on when people might be making a move or trying to attract more diversity, for example, like more females in engineering or you know, booking is such a diverse company. We have 121 nationalities and we try to continuously recruit from around the globe to keep our diversity. It’s one of our values and helps keep us innovative. So just tools around that. Those are things I’m really interested in as a talent acquisition leader on understanding when people might be making a move and what people might be good for our company and really keeping us diverse.
Matt Alder [00:13:26]:
Final question. We’re talking because you’re talking at HR Tech World Congress in a couple of weeks time actually in Paris. What are you sort of looking forward to at that event? What are you sort of hoping to hear? What sort of topics are on your radar? What are you looking out for?
Jennifer Boulanger [00:13:47]:
I think for me it’s being only in Europe for a year. I’m really excited to meet a lot of other European leaders and recruiters and HR people to kind of understand what the scope of the challenges are. I feel like I’m just at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to EMEA recruitment and what happens here because it was really something newer for me. I had much more experience in the US and in Asia PAC than I did in Europe. So for me I’m excited about that and really there’s some great topics. I was looking at some of the other speakers, of course. I’m really excited to see Richard Branson’s keynote and I know I’m just excited to network and meet other people.
Matt Alder [00:14:31]:
Jennifer, thank you very much for talking to me. My thanks to Jennifer Boulanger, My thanks also to the guys at HR Tech World Congress for their help in arranging the interview. Their event is taking place in Paris this October and you can find out more@hrtechcongress.com for show notes and past episodes of this podcast, please go to www.rfpodcast.com you can also subscribe to the mailing list there and find out more about me on the Work with Matt Alder page. You can of course subscribe to the podcast itself on itunes and also on Stitcher. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
