Client
Global Airline
Challenge
The client, a well known global airline, opens their hiring process for flight attendants once per year, leading to extremely high applicant volume. The client’s existing selection system for flight attendants was allowing too many unqualified candidates to pass down the funnel, overloading decision makers who had to review large volumes of candidate data but lacked information about candidate quality required to make sound hiring decisions. The inability of the hiring process to quickly identify qualified candidates and move them forward created an uncertainty about candidates that resulted in a reluctance to make job offers. So, despite having a large number of applicants, the client was not make enough job offers. While the client’s selection system included validated assessment tools, they realized changes to the overall process and its various components were needed. While the client required a compliant process based on validated tools, they also needed to ensure the hiring process was practical and streamlined enough to handle large applicant volumes while supporting decision makers with a focused set of candidate information.
Solution
The client engaged one of Rocket-Hire’s partner firms Talent Growth Advisors (a recruitment strategy consulting firm) to evaluate their current hiring process and make recommendations for revisions that would ensure better flow of qualified candidates, resulting in more job offers being made to qualified candidates. After detailed review of the existing process and client objectives, Talent Growth Advisors suggested a comprehensive set of changes to the client’s flight attendant hiring process. These changes began with a talent sourcing strategy designed to attract more qualified candidates, but also included many additional changes to the hiring process. Talent Growth Advisors also suggested the addition of a set of validated preferred qualifications screening questions to be placed at the beginning of the hiring process. The goal of these questions was to provide an automated tool for identifying the most qualified applicants. Talent Growth Advisors needed to ensure that all the changes they were implementing would be compliant and legally defensible. Talent Growth Advisors partnered with Rocket-Hire to provide oversight around legal compliance and to develop and validate a practical set of preferred qualifications questions that could be programmed directly into the client’s ATS. Rocket-Hire worked side by side with TGA and the client. Rocket-Hire’s first step was to review existing validation documents. Rocket-Hire then conducted a series of focus groups and surveys with SMEs to determine the applicant qualifications that lead to success on the job. Rocket-Hire then developed a set of preferred qualifications screening questions and worked directly with the client’s ATS provider to program and test the questions and their scoring algorithms. After the preferred qualifications screen was completed, Rocket-Hire assisted TGA with other key process revisions, including the development of structured interview questions and scoring guides and the evaluation of existing assessment tools to ensure they were relevant to the revised process.
Results
Talent Growth Advisors and Rocket-Hire were able to make changes that allowed the client to focus on candidate quality while handling large applicant volumes. Rocket-Hire’s support provided piece of mind in the form of validated screening questions that provided a practical way to highlight qualified candidates. Rocket-Hire and TGA were also able to remove several steps in the hiring process while introducing interview question and scoring that allowed those running the hiring process with decision making tools that provided confidence. The revised hiring process is currently underway and preliminary results indicate that it is accomplishing the client’s goals of making more job offers to qualified candidates while balancing practicality with compliance.