Aligning talent acquisition activities worldwide using Workday

Challenge

Our client was interested in using technology to better automate and streamline their recruitment processes across their global operations. At the time, their legacy applicant tracking system was outdated, had limited automation capabilities and was not integrated with Workday—their relatively new HCM solution. This meant that a number of recruitment activities (e.g., job requisitions, approvals, offer letters) were highly manual or required working across multiple disparate systems to complete. Other recruitment activities were conducted on a country-by-country basis using one-off processes and recruitment systems that made it difficult to analyze and report on recruitment at a global level.

In order to get the most value from their long-term commitment to the Workday ecosystem, our client was specifically interested in implementing the Workday Talent Acquisition module to drive improvements in its recruiting processes. With an ambitious ten-month timeline for implementation across its operations—which spanned fifteen countries and 120,000 people—this organization knew they would need a significant amount of assistance, particularly given the complexities associated with designing a global solution with enough flexibility to cater to local regulatory requirements.

Our extensive experience working with financial institutions and our holistic, collaborative and multidimensional approach were instrumental in this organization’s decision to work with us.

Approach

We used the New Workday Methodology to help our client move quickly and iteratively from the discovery phase of the project right through to implementation and beyond. This, combined with our highly collaborative approach, was essential for keeping transformation activities on track.

As a starting point, we brought together stakeholders from across different functions of our client’s organization in order to understand and define what they wanted to achieve both from an ROI perspective and from a benefits realization perspective. This allowed us to align transformation activities related to the implementation of Workday’s Talent Acquisition and Candidate Engagement Management modules with their desired outcomes. 

To meet our client’s tight timeframe for implementation, our approach included three dedicated workstream teams—each including subject matter specialists from PwC and knowledgeable client staff—who worked as one team to complete critical project activities. These workstreams included:

Risk & Controls (R&C)

Our R&C team worked alongside the Workday functional and technical team to apply a risk-based lens to the design of the Workday Talent Acquisition and CEM modules so that controls were considered and implemented upfront and integrated effectively. This helped our client improve their risk coverage, identify control automation opportunities and reduce the risk of costly rework and noncompliance.

Business Integration (BI)

Our BI team was focused on understanding the employee experience and moments that matter in order to better understand the services HR was delivering and their impact; this helped streamline our client’s operating model, business processes and Talent Acquisition and CEM module functionality to better support the HR needs of the business.

Organizational Change Management (OCM)

Our OCM team worked from the design phase to equip our client’s staff with the tools and training they needed to successfully use the new Talent Acquisition and CEM modules. This included designing training plans, developing both instructor-led and self-serve training assets, managing the execution and delivery of training programs in English and French and monitoring and reporting on training effectiveness and adoption. The change management program was essential for ensuring buy-in and adoption of the new processes and Workday modules across the organization.

Our approach also prioritized knowledge transfer right from the design phase so that our client would be well-positioned to confidently take over critical activities (e.g., maintenance, troubleshooting, new value creation) once the modules were fully implemented and running smoothly. This focus on knowledge transfer was critically important to our client as they wanted to avoid the transition challenges they’d experienced during their initial Workday implementation.

Impact

Our client was able to implement Workday’s Talent Acquisition and CEM modules successfully across its entire global operations within its desired ten-month timeframe. They now have a streamlined and highly standardized global recruitment process that takes advantage of significant process automation, in addition to a solution that is seamlessly integrated with their other Workday modules and HR specific solutions. The new modules and related processes have also significantly improved our client’s reporting capabilities compared to its previous ATS system by providing more consistent data and automatically generated dashboards to support analytics.