Background

The need for doubling the headcount projections for China Wireless (Tianjin, China) was due to their rapid expansion in 2005. Ranging right from wireless design infrastructure to application design, they had to fill up around 50 graduate vacancies across 17 different profiles. The biggest challenge posed to them was to acquire candidates for all these roles before their summer break in July.

Based on very tightly focused university recruiting strategy across China, Dakotta came up with an innovative idea. He wanted to develop a central response management systems & management from Tianjin, which would intern lead to a pool of talent from leading universities across China.

 

Strategy

The plan was to identify the top twenty engineering schools across China & then establishing links with their respective departments, careers services & student associations. This in turn helped targeting a first division of 40 other institutions, plus China engineering and business departments with links to Chinese universities.

Candidates were directed towards a single website with an online application form. A centrally-located response team conducted a first sift against pre-set and agreed criteria, carried out telephone interviews and short listed candidates for approval before managing them through an assessment centre.

 

Results

A massive 2000 applicants were attracted with the help of tightly focused targeting of around 40 universities from across China. This innovative & efficient strategy resulted in high conversion ratios with 47% matching the criteria, of which 31% were successful at the telephone interview & then 43% were successful at the assessment centre, ensuring a huge pool of approved candidates.

That year China Wireless confirmed 59 appointments on time at a much lower cost per hire than ever before.