Heineken optimizes its recruitment process through automation: saving its recruiters over 10,000 hours

Heineken, founded in 1864, has grown to become the second-largest beer brand globally, offering more than 300 beer and cider brands, as well as premium international low-alcohol and non-alcoholic beverages.

Heineken was finding it difficult to adapt to the sudden increase in its high-volume hiring needs due to labor reforms in Mexico in recent years. As a result of these changes, Heineken needed to hire more than double the number of frontline workers as full employees. This exponential increase in vacancies made the manual processes they had in place even harder to manage."We needed a solution that would help us simplify our recruitment process to fill multiple positions across various locations, all with a lean team. Our recruiters can't do everything at once, and that's why we needed Emi." Jorge Davila Martinez, Head of Talent Acquisition at Heineken.

Before finding Emi, Heineken faced the following challenges:Adapting to a 150% increase in labor demand due to labor reforms in Mexico.Having an excessively long time-to-hire across all its locations, resulting in the loss of key talent to competitors.Having manual processes that did not align with the digital culture of frontline candidates.Lacking access to organizational metrics to inform strategic decision-making.

Heineken turned to Emi, the leading automated frontline recruitment platform, to tackle the numerous challenges they already had.

The pandemic led many in-person operations to adapt to a digital environment, and Heineken's hiring processes were no exception. With Emi's support, Heineken was able to migrate to platforms that are familiar to candidates, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Now, candidates can submit their applications through Emi's recruitment chatbot, which intelligently collects information and routes it to existing applicant tracking systems (ATS).

This change significantly reduced paperwork, manual processes, and the time candidates historically spent on their application process. Additionally, by reducing the time spent per candidate, the team was able to scale its operations without needing to double its HR hiring. Furthermore, since the form-free application process proved to be so simple and intuitive for digital natives, Heineken experienced an immediate increase in its talent pipeline.

On the other hand, Heineken observed that limiting communication to conventional business hours was lengthening the hiring process. The team realized that 73% of candidate conversations with Emi occurred outside of business hours. Without Emi, communication would have depended exclusively on people reaching out only during normal business hours.

Heineken didn't stop at rethinking the early stages of the hiring process. The company leveraged Emi's direct communication system even in the initial onboarding phases. The hiring team sent videos and training materials to new employees to help them understand their responsibilities and how to carry them out. This helped reduce the time needed for first-day onboarding and significantly improved the new employee experience.

Heineken experienced several impressive results after beginning its collaboration with Emi, including:Reducing time spent on manual recruitment tasks.Leveraging hiring process information and data from multiple locations.Improving the quality of candidates hired for all positions.Achieving its ambitious coverage goals.

Here is how these changes have impacted the organization:

Reducing time spent on manual recruitment tasks:

By using Emi to optimize each stage of the hiring process, Heineken's talent acquisition team was able to eliminate more than 10,000 hours from its manual workload in 2022. This allowed the team to focus on building its employer brand and executing its talent acquisition strategy.

Leveraging hiring process information and data from multiple locations:

Today, the hiring team can easily visualize the performance of each of its locations. It can gain valuable insights, such as which talent attraction tactics are most effective, which channels generate the most candidates, and at which stage the most candidates drop off. With this data, Heineken's leadership team can more efficiently allocate resources to initiatives that prove effective and make more accurate forecasts.

Improving the quality of candidates hired for all positions:

Thanks to Emi's screening profiles, Heineken's recruiters can spend more time cultivating relationships with the best candidates, rather than spending that time trying to find them."Emi has helped us optimize our candidate funnel, reducing a pool of over 200 unqualified candidates to a pool of 20 qualified candidates." - Jorge Davila Martinez, Head of Talent Acquisition at Heineken.

It's no surprise that finding qualified candidates faster has had other positive effects beyond the hiring process. Heineken has seen a 62.5% year-over-year reduction in turnover, attributed (in part) to the team's ability to identify and hire the best candidates for open positions.

Achieving its ambitious coverage goals:

Heineken's recruitment team had set the ambitious goal of achieving a 98% coverage rate (meaning only 2% of vacancies would go unfilled). Since implementing Emi, Heineken has been able to maintain an average coverage rate of 98.3%-99% across all its locations, something that was not possible with the manual processes used before.