Case study:
ABB

Organizing an Assessment Center online

About company

ABB is a technology leader that has supported the digital transformation of industry for decades. The company operates through four business areas: Electrical Engineering, Industrial Automation, Drive Systems, and Robotics and Discrete Automation. ABB is present in more than 100 countries around the world and employs about 110,000 people.

For more than 25 years ABB has also been present in Poland, where its investment in research and development units has helped it to achieve the status of one of the most innovative companies.

Industry: Industry and technology

Number of employees: 110,000

Challenge: Moving employer branding activities to the online world

Employer branding activities during a pandemic

ABB in Kraków is recruiting for internships all year round, thanks to which the company is constantly acquiring young talent. A sizable contribution to recruitment for internship positions comes from standard employer branding activities such as participation in job fairs, open days at company headquarters or other forms of live meetings. Due to the situation that in March 2020 drastically reduced the ability to communicate with the labor market this type of standard action could not be taken.

In response to the new challenge ABB’s Kraków branch quickly implemented new innovative ways to reach students from the company’s key universities. One such way was through online webinars.

– “We have worked with Talent Place since 2018 in the recruitment for HR, Procurement, Finance, IT, Share Functions, Travel & Logistics Services departments. In total, we hired 1035 new employees during our cooperation. We are glad to work together on the recruitment of young and ambitious people, who think about the best start for their career. The most fruitful year of our cooperation with Talent Place was 2019, which ended in 290 new employments at ABB” –

– Peter Mitchell – Head of FTP for GBS FIOS

Online events as a response to the new realities of the job market

To capture the attention of candidates ABB decided on a fresh, interactive form of webinars that was meant to go beyond previous online event standards. It was crucial to attract the attention of people with the right profile, to be able to interact with participants in a qualitative way and to provide students with a solid dose of knowledge. Given our previous successful cooperation with Talent Place in recruiting interns ABB took advantage of our support in organizing and delivering two webinars.

The key to the success of the project turned out to be the selection of topics that were interesting for the target group, as well as cooperation with ABB’s Talent Acquisition and Early Talent & University Relations teams. The meetings took among others form of short lectures and virtual conversations with participants. They focused primarily on providing real value and knowledge to participants. The first was designed to brighten young people’s minds about how to start a corporate career. Due to the great interest of participants in ABB’s internship programs the second webinar was completely dedicated to this topic. Current ABB interns were also involved in the events and were able to share their own experiences of internships in different units of the company and present the advantages of internship programs.

Webinars as a more effective form of job fairs

Thanks to an accurate selection of topics and the high quality of prepared meetings both events were a huge success. The promotional campaign implemented by Talent Place reached over 30,000 people and the events attracted 238 and 183 attendees, respectively. Proof of the high quality of the meetings and appropriately prepared topics was the high conversion rate – during the promotion of the first webinar 1 in 4 people visiting the sign-up page decided to attend the event.

“Cooperation with Talent Place in organizing webinars for students allowed us to fully focus on content preparation. Talent Place took care of all the organizational and technical issues and organized a set of promotional activities. Thanks to their support we managed to gather 238 and 183 participants respectively and as a result we received 68 applications for our junior and internship positions. What was crucial for us in this project was the fact that this form of initiatives and cooperation with Talent Place allowed us to share a solid dose of knowledge with students of our key universities and during the meeting we did not have to compete for their attention with other employers.” – Agnieszka Wójciga, Employer Branding Expert, ABB.

During the events, participants also had the opportunity to talk to ABB representatives and ask about their concerns. In total, more than 80 questions were asked, which were answered by company representatives during Q&A sessions at the end of the events and by email after the meetings. The quality of the meetings is also demonstrated by the satisfaction level of the participants. 80% of those who completed the evaluation questionnaire for the second event rated the webinar and the relevance of the knowledge provided with the highest possible score.