LinkedIn and Nestlé

Innovation through recruitment

Nestlé operates in a highly competitive and dynamic business environment. Staying ahead of the game calls for innovation — especially when you’re looking to fill more than 30,000 positions each year.

How does Nestlé take talent acquisition to a new level?
Let’s hear what the stakeholders have to say.

Nestlé at a glance

Nestlé is the leading Nutrition, Health and Wellness company, committed to enhancing people's lives by offering tastier and healthier food and beverage choices at all stages of life and at all times of the day.

Headquartered in Vevey, Switzerland, around 339,000 employees worldwide, operations in more than 197 countries and over 2000 brands. With almost 30,000 job openings annually — and a real need for local expertise — recruitment needs to constantly re-invent itself.

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“We’re on an exciting journey — connecting market recruiting activities and leveraging our combined strengths."

Together with the local recruitment teams, Ben is always on the lookout for best practice and successful methods of sourcing top talent.

This kind of collaborative effort gives local recruiters room to innovate, while focusing on their own unique local needs, which can vary considerably. By creating a community of colleagues worldwide, Nestlé promotes an ongoing exchange of new ideas.

There’s a new mindset at Nestlé — proactive recruitment

As Nestlé grows 4,2% p.a. it continuously faces a need for talent. With around 30,000 job openings annually, it is increasingly difficult to hire the very best. The international nature of their operation calls for outstanding talent that can fit the highly specific needs of Nestlé’s local markets. To better match the diversity of their customers, the recruiters at Nestlé also aim to create a more diverse workforce. Their business moves at pace, so it becomes increasingly important to find talent quickly.

So Nestlé has introduced a new approach: proactive recruitment. The aim is to connect sourcing activity with forecasted business needs. Proactive recruitment could also elevate the profession of the recruiter from cost center to center of excellence.

This new approach can keep the company ahead of the game, but their recruiters also have to be willing to get down to basics and focus, starting with the business.

So recruiters at Nestlé need to make it their job to know what’s going on in their company. The latest challenges, opportunities, who is leaving where (and when), new skills needed, ways to could support the teams and other key insights to drive connections with the business and talent strategy.

Proactive recruitment calls for good data analysis, asking hiring managers tough questions and working closely with business managers. By deeply understanding the current situation, recruiters can forecast better—and have the best candidates lined up and ready when needed.

This new approach also extends to the candidates. Nestlé recruiters have started learning more about their top candidates and their needs. Keeping in touch with warm candidates is a must. By building on engagement, recruiters know when the time is ripe for change, if the candidate is willing to move for the new job and other essential information.

“We’re working towards 0 days-to-fill.”

Brook Lashley Lynch was in charge of implementing proactive recruiting at Nestlé Purina USA.

“Attracting top talent in our region—especially sales professionals—is more difficult due to geographic reasons and the lowest unemployment rate in 6 years. We also want to create a more diverse workforce to better match the diversity of our customers. It was taking 70 to 80 days to fill a position!”

“We decided to spread the-efforts over 6 regions in the USA. Based on deep analysis of data and input from each region, we could forecast roles that were expected to be in demand in the near future. That made it easy to build the right talent pipelines for each region.”

“Days-to-fill have decreased by 136% with over 9 times more 0 days to fill. Diversity has increased 111%, compared with the previous year — female hires have increased by 30%. All in all, Nestlé Purina USA managed to fill 38% more roles than the previous year.”

We asked Brook to share some tips about proactive recruitment. A must-read for every recruiter.

Building your bench proactively

Su Yen Ng is a business executive manager for Nestlé Malaysia & Singapore. From her perspective, proactive recruitment means identifying future needs and planning ahead for them.

One looming challenge for the business unit was a weak talent bench. Some higher-level positions had no succession plan in place. At the same time, the local market was unable to supply enough candidates with the functional skills required for lower-level feeder roles. So the Head of Talent Acquisition for Malaysia and Singapore, Nicholas Dhillon took a two-pronged approach.

For the long term, they immediately started courting talent based on director-level referrals to build a talent pipeline for strategic roles. Whether or not vacancies exist, the company proactively sources nonstop, using LinkedIn Recruiter to directly access potential candidates.

But what could they do immediately? Nicholas’s team identified relatively junior roles that, with the right training, could quickly provide scarce skills. They hired into these roles based on hunger, potential, and cultural fit, rather than existing skill. After 15 months of experience and training, 100% of the new hires were retained.

Find out more about proactive recruitment and how LinkedIn can collaborate with your company

"Proactive recruitment drives Nestle's business forward."

Ben Clark, Corporate Head of Resourcing, Nestlé