Leading Asian Bank Optimised and Automated Their Talent Recruitment Approach with Accendo

Project Highlights

Business Challenge

Develop a Standardised Assessment Approach to Secure Top Talents​​

The dynamic banking industry called for a need for greater agility and innovation. The bank’s FIT22 strategy prioritises customer-centricity, productivity, and innovation, which has gone a long way towards ensuring business resilience despite the volatility during the pandemic and continues to pave the way towards achieving sustainable progress.

To strengthen their FIT22 aspirations and ensure a fast response rate to the rapid change in customer needs, the bank plans to further accelerate their digital transformation programme, simplify their delivery channel, and continue to expand their product suites.

These efforts will be reflected in their next five-year strategy, which also includes a new five-year sustainability strategy to drive sustainability efforts within the bank. The foundation of this new phase is their new Purpose Statement, Making Progress Happen for Everyone, which will serve as a beacon for all staff towards achieving their collective aspirations.

However, with rapidly changing workforce demographics and an increase in the percentage of millennial workers, the bank needed a more modern approach to recruiting and assessing top talent. They agreed that their current recruitment approach was highly manual and unscalable and, at the same time, unappealing to the new generation of talents.

There were also concerns regarding a lack of clear understanding of competencies required to objectively assess the candidates against the new requirements. This resulted in a decrease in the business’ competitiveness within the financial and banking industry. The bank’s current talent acquisition approach gave off a traditional recruitment experience which led to poor top talent attraction.

Agile Workforce

The bank has been in a partnership with Accendo for six years and has decided to reach out to them once more for a long-term solution to address both the needs at the executive level and that of the organisation as a whole.

They expressed the need for a uniform and robust talent assessment strategy to reduce the risk of bad hires. At the same time, inefficient processes led to increased costs and higher turnaround time. In order to align with these changes, the bank needed to update its definition of critical roles and skills, and hire talents in line with the organisation’s new requirements.

Their current and ongoing partnership allowed them to connect with Accendo regarding their challenges. With the bank’s unique requirements and hiring goals in mind, Accendo presented a solution that would attract the right candidates to apply, simplify the recruitment process for the bank, and provide constant support and guidance to the candidates to ensure effective onboarding and a minimal drop-off rate. The solution included the following steps:

1. New and Updated Competency Models

A digital platform and a customised competency framework allowed the bank to manage their recruitment process efficiently while standardising the assessment approach to secure the best talents. This included an updated talent assessment model and an agile workforce model to benchmark candidates and determine the quality of hires based on their current needs.

2. Role Specific Assessments

The quality of hiring would be improved using Accendo’s best-of-breed assessment tools against the contextualised competencies for the bank. This included the use of psychometric assessments for recruitment across all levels, from graduate upwards. The tools were selected based on the requirements at each level.

3. Enhanced Applicant Tracking System

Accendo’s Applicant Tracking System was used for the end-to-end recruitment process for the bank graduate program. This was a huge leap from their traditional recruitment approach and the modern user experience of the recruitment process resulted in an engaging candidate experience for the graduates.

4. Upskilling the Recruitment Team

The bank’s recruitment team was trained and upskilled on how to conduct competency-based interviews. This enabled the team to analyse the talent assessment data, conduct a structured interview process, and make smarter hiring decisions.

Results

The Bank Enhances its Talent Recruitment Processes and Improves Their Talent Pool Quality

Overall, the bank was able to achieve its objective of building an agile pool of talents through the digitisation of its recruitment and assessment processes. Their recruitment process was now bias-free, thereby ensuring consistent hiring of the targeted talent profile.

Cognitive tools were also used to test agility, ensuring that the talents brought in were of the desired high calibre. In turn, the bank’s recruitment and HR processes became more data-driven which aligned with their aim of making strategic decisions based on data analysis and interpretation. Armed with high volume testing and availability of data, they were able to benchmark and improve the quality of hiring, and ultimately building a workforce with higher agility.

The decision to work with Accendo allowed the bank to achieve its objective of establishing a bespoke, high-level talent recruitment solution that could help them identify talent and personalities aligned with the bank’s organisational culture, while learning how to implement effective strategies in their future talent management processes.