A case study with Olivier Fruchon, HR Development Manager, Banques Populaires & Caisses d’Epargne, Groupe BPCE.
Introduction
In a world where data is king, recruitment is no exception. Companies are constantly looking to optimize their recruitment processes, in order to attract the best talent while keeping costs under control. With this in mind, Groupe BPCE, with its forty companies and considerable workforce, has embarked on a digital transformation of recruitment under the leadership of Olivier Fruchon, Head of Recruitment Partnerships. We spoke to Olivier to find out how Data Driven has been a catalyst in this transformation.
Created through the 2009 merger of Banque Fédérale des Banques Populaires and Caisse Nationale des Caisses d’Épargne, Groupe BPCE is France’s second-largest banking group. With 100,000 employees dedicated to serving 35 million customers worldwide, including individuals, professionals, businesses, investors and local authorities. The group is active in retail banking and insurance in France, and finances 20% of the French economy, testifying to its substantial impact on the national economic fabric.
Beyond its banking mission, BPCE is committed to innovation and digital transformation. As part of our collaboration, the Group has adopted Data Driven to optimize its recruitment processes and meet the challenges inherent in human resources management within its forty companies. This initiative, led by Olivier Fruchon, Head of Recruitment Partnerships, aims to centralize and harmonize recruitment practices, while offering greater visibility on the performance of recruitment channels. The diversity of Groupe BPCE’s activities, its cooperative and customer-centric approach, and its commitment to innovation, provide a propitious framework to illustrate the effectiveness and usefulness of Data Driven in modernizing large-scale recruitment operations.
Context
The BPCE Group, made up of some forty medium-sized companies, each with between 2,000 and 5,000 employees, presents fertile ground for innovative recruitment initiatives. Olivier Fruchon, in his pivotal role as Recruitment Partnerships Manager, has the onerous task of coordinating and centralizing recruitment service orders for these various entities. His mission doesn’t stop there; he also contributes his expertise to help these companies refine their recruitment practices.
Each company within the BPCE group has its own challenges and dynamics when it comes to human resources management. The heterogeneity of HR skills and the often greater power of sales people compared to HR professionals are challenges that Olivier has to face on a daily basis. The objective is clear: to bring more HR skills, increase visibility and raise the maturity of recruitment practices within the group’s different companies.
In this context, digitizing recruitment is not just an option, but a necessity to remain competitive and attractive on the job market. This is where Groupe BPCE’s collaboration with Data Driven…
Challenges
The complexity of recruitment operations within Groupe BPCE is accentuated by the diversity of HR skills present in its various companies. This heterogeneity presents a particular challenge when it comes to harmonizing practices and establishing a consistent group-wide recruitment strategy. What’s more, the power dynamics between sales teams and HR professionals tend to tip the balance in favor of the former, making the task of centralizing and optimizing HR resources even more arduous.
Awareness of these challenges led Olivier to initiate a digital recruitment transformation a year and a half ago. The key idea was to put managers back at the heart of HR decisions, by providing them with the tools and data they needed to make informed decisions. The year 2023 marks a turning point in this initiative, with the implementation of Data Driven for the first time in a move to empower managers.
Data Driven offers a solution for basing recruitment decisions on quantified data, a significant advance on traditional approaches. It promises greater visibility on the performance of recruitment channels, and consequent optimization of HR budgets.
Solutions
Olivier’s discovery of Data Driven came at a time when he was looking to improve the traceability of job applications. The gradual roll-out of the tool to the Human Resources Directors (HRDs) of the Group’s various companies aims to provide better visibility of the performance of recruitment channels. Data Driven is thus a partner of choice for analyzing and optimizing HR budgets, while providing valuable data for informed decision-making.
Olivier stresses the crucial importance of analyzing data carefully, taking into account the specific context of each company. He warns that hasty comparisons between recruitment channels can be misleading. Data Driven enables contextualized analysis, making it easier to understand recruitment processes and improve the employer brand.
According to Olivier, HR departments should take a detailed look at their spending, targeting, ad copy, origin of applicants, etc., taking into account their regional context, local partners and past practices. This careful analysis, supported by the data provided by Data Driven, can reveal optimization opportunities and contribute to a better allocation of resources.
Limits
Although Olivier sees great potential in the use of Data Driven, he admits that he still lacks the hindsight to fully assess its impact. He would like to compare 10 to 15 of his companies, digging deeper than just reading their dashboards, to get a clearer picture of their performance. Benchmarking against other industry players could also prove invaluable. However, he lacks the time to go that far in the analysis at the moment. This underlines the importance of ongoing, in-depth analysis to get the most out of the tool.
Artificial intelligence is often associated with speed and efficiency. However, Olivier is not totally convinced of its contribution to the quality of HR processes, at least for the time being. The question remains: will AI free up time to focus on the core HR business? Only time will tell. But by automating repetitive tasks, it could offer HR professionals the luxury of focusing on more strategic activities. It could also bring an analytical dimension to recruitment, helping to identify promising candidates or anticipate future needs. However, the major challenge lies in managing the potential biases of algorithms and balancing automation with the human interaction essential to maintaining an authentic, positive recruitment experience.
As part of Groupe BPCE’s collaboration with Data Driven, exploring these aspects of AI can contribute to more nuanced thinking on HR process optimization. The future could see a more harmonious human-machine collaboration, where AI, complementing human expertise, could play a key role in the continuous improvement of recruitment operations.
Olivier’s and Groupe BPCE’s future projects include refining the use of Data Driven to get more benchmarks on the performance of different recruitment channels, and developing employer branding. He recommends Data Driven as a valuable tool for measuring recruitment performance and fostering constructive dialogue on data.
Olivier sees a promising future for the collaboration between BPCE and Data Driven. He envisions a deepening use of the tool to gain more precise insights and contribute to the ongoing development of the group’s employer brand.
Conclusion
The transition to data-driven recruitment is a journey, not a destination. Groupe BPCE’s experience, led by Olivier, demonstrates the potential of Data Driven to transform recruitment operations. By highlighting challenges, solutions and prospects, this case study offers valuable insight into how a data-driven approach can add tangible value to companies seeking to optimize their recruitment strategy.
