How have you continued to evolve and modernize the Marriott hiring process as new tech has emerged?
Meghan Rhatigan: Post-pandemic the hiring world changed dramatically. And we had a situation where we had many more jobs posted than there were applicants to hire. And this was honestly a situation that we had not been in before being Marriott. We always had plenty of candidates to choose from and all of a sudden post-pandemic, the whole world changed. So we said to ourselves, "Well, we can't operate under the same old HCM that we've been using for years. That doesn't actually help us move faster. We need to think about how we do things differently." So what we decided to do was in-source all of our hourly hiring — so take it back to have more control over the technology and move as fast as we needed to move in the competitive market that we’re in.
We also started to introduce new technology to help introduce automation into the process. Because the way that we look at hourly hiring now, it's a business. We run a business. So I have my own P&L and I look at the labor costs, I look at my tech costs, I look at speed, and I look at conversion and how that all comes together in my cost per hire. So I have essentially a multimillion-dollar business that I'm running within my recruiting function, just dedicated to hourly hiring.
AI can be a tough sell for large brands. What did the process look like for you to adopt AI?
MR: Very early on when I first started talking about AI in TA, I could barely get the word out before I was told "no." People thought there was too much risk in “AI” as it was an unknown factor in TA at the time. We had to get through some tough early conversations just to break through the "no's.” And honestly, take the word AI out of our vocabulary altogether. We took a step back and took what I refer to as the "Trojan Horse approach" — which was to start with automated interview scheduling. Yes, there's AI involved in that, but it's pretty low risk and it was not initially socialized as AI, but as automation instead. It was the first use case for introducing AI, under the guise of automation into our process and we saw some amazing ROI with that taking interviews from 10 days to be scheduled down to 3. So we had proof that AI worked, and we were able to incrementally add more from that point on.
After adding that automation component, how long does it take now to get somebody scheduled for an interview with a property manager?
MR: If it's a text message, which I would say about 90% of our interviews are scheduled via text, we get interviews scheduled within 15 minutes – that’s our average across all of the hundreds of thousands of interviews that we schedule. Email, it's actually like four hours. So that's the difference between text and email in terms of speed to schedule, it's pretty incredible.
And then on the application side, we sliced our application down to about six minutes. We took away the whole “create your login” screen. So we eliminated as many barriers as we could on that front because speed was king and we just weren't competitive in that way.
What do you do about positions that don’t have enough applicant flow? Because it’s always those 10% of positions that cause all the pain and stress. What’s your approach to minimizing the pain there?
MR: For us, we work hand in hand with our people brand team and our employment brand team, so we can optimize organic traffic. So the less money that I have to pay for candidates, the better off we'll be. And if we look at our conversion rates, organic traffic always is higher quality. We get more hires out of that. We do a lot of work around driving our organic traffic in. Where we need to, of course we'll pay, but our preference is to really optimize our SEO and make sure that we're building a very solid flow within our career pages.
The less money that I have to pay for candidates, the better off we'll be. And if we look at our conversion rates, organic traffic always is higher quality.
What makes a "good recruiter?" Is there a way that Marriott measures that?
MR: We built what we call the “recruiter effectiveness dashboard.” And it essentially gets into conversion at every single step of the TA process. For example, I can look at the dashboard and understand how well any one or all recruiters are doing with screening based on how many of those screens it takes to get to a hire. If they're screening 15 people and they're only getting one hire, that’s not very efficient and indicates a candidate quality problem. We're wasting money. We need to get that lower. Instead of being 15 to one, you need to get down to seven to one or five to one.
Another important thing I can look at is the conversion rate for interviews. And if I see that our hiring managers are doing more than two interviews, that to me is a red flag. I don't want them talking to more than two people. This is the high volume, hourly hiring space. Get in, get the hire done, get out.
