What’s Behind the Recruiting Transformation of Salmat

Anastasia Liberatos is the real deal. As talent acquisition leader at Salmat, one of Australia’s leading marketing services companies, she has led a truly impressive transformation of the company’s recruiting department.

Anastasia started working at Salmat back in 2012 and in only two years, has transformed the image of her recruiting team from “service providers to valued business partners.” She restructured the talent acquisition team around the recruiters’ areas of expertise and, through introducing innovative practices and technologies, she managed to dramatically boost the measurable ROI her team provides.

Anastasia will present the details of this impressive transformation and share strategies and tips on April 30^th at Talent Connect Sydney. Join us to hear her speak live. In the meantime, here’s a taste of her story:

What's your role at Salmat?

I lead a team of Talent Acquisition Specialists across Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines. My role is to bring the best talent to Salmat via attracting candidates through innovative ways—all the while ensuring that we’re recognised as an employer of choice. My team is comprised of 16 total: 10 in Australia, four in New Zealand, and two in the Philippines.

You’ve been at Salmat for over 2 years now. Can you describe some of the challenges the talent acquisition team faced when you got there?

I was fortunate enough to come into an organisation that has had an internal recruitment team since 2007. I started with getting to understand the business and the complexity of the talent requirements for our two divisions - Customer Engagement Solution (CES) and Customer Marketing Solutions (CMS) – as well as corporate (Head office). The roles varied from call centre IT, digital, and targeted media, to executive roles such as heads of Divisions.

After that, I assessed the recruitment team and their skill set. I wanted to create a team that was a true partner to the business. We accomplished this by building a team of experienced recruiters with backgrounds that matched our divisional requirements. These recruiters understood the need for urgency and had the ability to proactively search the market.

With the revamped team in place, we needed to build trust with senior management, who viewed the recruiters as service providers and not business partners.

Our first challenge was establishing credibility with the hiring managers. Traditionally most of the recruiting had been done by recruitment agencies, and we had to work extra hard to prove our team can deliver value and results. Eventually, as we were quite successful, we ended up changing the process of engaging an agency.

As a next step we took on passive candidate recruiting and started using LinkedIn Recruiter. This change was all about delivering ROI. If we invested $10,000 in a LinkedIn Recruiter seat, could we guarantee lower cost-per-hire? And we succeeded.

We also provided data to managers made them aware of their cost per hire, time to hire and what their agencies spend was.

And, finally, we focused on talent brand. We have a unique culture, and we wanted everyone to know it. We created YouTube clips for each division, to attract the right talent and give them a look inside our business.

What have been the biggest hurdles in driving this transformation at Salmat?

I would identify our three biggest challenges as the following:

• Building trust and delivering on our promise.
• Obtaining backing of the executive leadership team members to drive change through the business. Our Head of People & Culture was a huge advocate.
• Having new managers and going through the process again—it’s an ongoing challenge.

We’re really excited that you’ve agreed to share your inspiring story at Talent Connect Sydney. What are you looking forward to most?

I attended Talent Connect Sydney and Las Vegas last year. There are three main things I’m looking forward to:

• New ideas on getting the best talent, talent pooling, and employer branding.
• Networking.
• LinkedIn products and solutions – what is new and how it is working. There’s always something new. I get a lot of value out of it.

What are two things that you want the audience to take away from your keynote?

Know what your end-game is and then drive that change.

What’s one thing that’s not on your LinkedIn profile?

I was a hospital specialist representative with a science background and I ended up in recruitment.

Don’t miss Anastasia’s keynote at Talent Connect Sydney on Wednesday, 30th April. Learn more or register here.