Overview

TELUS International (NYSE and TSX: TIXT) designs, builds and delivers digital solutions for global and disruptive brands. We provide strategy and innovation, next-gen technology and IT services, and CX process and delivery solutions to support the full lifecycle of our more than 600 clients’ digital transformation journeys and enable them to more quickly embrace digital technologies to deliver better business outcomes and fuel growth. We partner with brands across high growth industry verticals, including tech and games, communications and media, eCommerce and fintech, healthcare, and travel and hospitality to shape their digital vision and strategies, design scalable processes and identity opportunities for innovation and growth.

Supernova Award Category

Future of Work: Human Capital Management

The Problem

Attracting, recruiting and retaining top talent is crucial to business success, but in today’s expanding work-from-home environments it can be challenging when in-person interactions aren’t an option, yet customers still expect consistent, seamless and reliable support when they connect with their preferred brands. It all starts with having a talented and qualified team but with physical distancing measures and restrictions in place globally, businesses needed to quickly develop alternate ways to source top talent beyond traditional recruitment strategies and simultaneously find tech and platforms to enable virtual coaching, training, learning and development opportunities.

A TELUS International client was in need of more frontline team members that we were sourcing for their new brick-and-mortar site in Guatemala, but had to shift gears due to COVID-19, and the client leveraged TELUS International’s remote talent acquisition process to enable them to continue recruiting, training and onboarding their new employees entirely remotely, ensuring business continuity and continued growth. 

The Solution

At the onset of the pandemic, TELUS International leveraged its traditional recruitment model and next-gen technologies to establish a digital talent acquisition solution to enable businesses to find alternate ways to strategically recruit, onboard, train and manage their talent 100% remotely from end-to-end.

Accessible across multiple devices, TELUS International’s holistic, cloud-powered remote talent acquisition solutions utilize unique recruitment tactics, proven frameworks and leading-edge technology to digitally find and hire the best-fit candidates - all while reducing costs and time to fill. From an eight-hour, partially in-person process, the solution leverages recruitment chatbots to move a successful candidate from online application to new hire training in just 125-minutes, ensuring a rapid and robust pipeline of global candidates suitable for “work anywhere” (at the office, or in the home) positions.

The results

Following the launch of TELUS International’s remote talent acquisition solutions, clients were able to continue sourcing and onboarding top customer experience talent securely and efficiently to meet the increased demands of their business, despite the uncertainties posed by the pandemic.

Our end-to-end remote recruitment solutions enable many key benefits including:

• Evolving the way brands recruit talent: virtual sourcing and screening through next-gen technology, social platforms and virtual events to increase efficiency and capacity for candidate outreach.
• Streamlining a digital hiring process: utilizing best-in-class digital solutions and platforms to complete remote interviews, virtual reference checks and digital paperwork to significantly compress the hiring timeframe.
• Effective and sustained remote workforce management: from contactless onboarding welcome kits to podcasts and webinar e-learning to remote training and coaching, we ensure best practices for high engagement in a remote workforce.

Beyond the initial recruitment process, TELUS International takes a holistic approach to leveraging technology to improve job satisfaction, performance and corporate culture, which ultimately impacts the customer experience. As such, these digital recruitment solutions are backed by a full range of remote programs to ensure team members feel well-supported and engaged, not only with their work, but also with their fellow team members across the globe.

Metrics

TELUS International has seen tremendous success with its remote recruitment solutions. Currently, the brand has more than 510,000 global applicants in its recruitment database, ensuring it’s ready to fill a variety of positions/skill sets and language requirements as needed. In 2020, TELUS International attracted 2 million visits to its career site in addition to 448,000 visits (between May-Dec 2020) to its internal referral portal where its own team members have the ability to refer candidates. Moreover, because of the ease and convenience of the automated referral platform, TELUS International also saw an increase of 102% in referral applications in 2020 compared to 2019, with 42% of all new hires coming from the referral portal last year.

The digital recruitment platform also automates and streamlines workflows and processes so that recruitment experts can spend their time focusing on more complex tasks and connecting with candidates rather than time consuming administrative work, saving the company $374,000 in time-savings and labor costs over a two and half year timeframe.

Some industries faced a downturn in business during the pandemic and others needed to quickly ramp up. Within two months at the onset of COVID-19, TELUS International onboarded almost 1,200 new team members through its remote talent acquisition solutions and transferred 2,100 team members between client accounts, keeping its team safe and employed.

The Technology

The solution created was the Remote Talent Acquisition process, which effectively enables brands to strategically source, onboard and train top talent remotely. This holistic, cloud-powered solution includes smart screening and classification programs that leverage recruitment chatbots to guide candidates through the virtual application process. Accessible from anywhere across multiple devices, it enables an efficient way to push new updates and learning opportunities for team members remotely

Disruptive Factor

Without a doubt, the pandemic has impacted businesses in nearly every industry, challenging the status quo and forcing businesses to drastically change the way they operate in nearly every capacity including hiring, onboarding and day-to-day employee management and engagement, and notably, TELUS International’s remote talent acquisition solutions helped brands successfully navigate through this unpredictable time. 

Backed by the company’s proven Culture Value Chain correlating high employee engagement to better business outcomes, TELUS International’s success in expertly streamlining its remote recruitment process from the point of online application to new hire training to just 125 minutes certainly makes it unique. This process has been highly effective due to the company’s enhanced security and verification procedures, which utilize best-in-class digital solutions and platforms to complete remote interviews, virtual reference checks and digital paperwork, as well as using RPA (Robotic Process Automation) when appropriate to help move candidates through the process, significantly compressing the hiring timeframe. Leveraging its AI solutions, TELUS International also has a chatbot to help candidates with their applications.

Shining Moment

At TELUS International, we are most proud of our caring culture. We have consistently invested in nurturing it over the years, and its power was exemplified over the past year during the pandemic. Because of our highly-engaged team members, we were able to quickly pivot to a remote working model and support one another by leveraging our virtual, digital and cloud capabilities. Despite the many challenges, our global employee engagement score rose by 100 basis points to 86% in 2020.