Building a successful alumni program with Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group
The challenge
Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group is the award winning owner and operator of some of the most luxurious hotels, resorts and residences located in prime destinations around the world. Increasingly recognisedrecognized for creating some of the world’s most sought-after properties, the Group provides 21st century luxury with oriental charm.
As the Director of Human Resources and Talent Acquisition, it is Lien Chu’s responsibility to drive global talent acquisition to support organisationalorganizational growth. However, the impact of COVID-19 led to a significant drop in hiring needs with recruitment freezes across many organisations in the Hospitality industry. For Lien, this was an opportunity to rethink and pivot the Group’s talent acquisition strategy to focus on employer branding and building talent communities.
The focus
Mandarin Oriental identified its alumni networks – former employees – as an untapped source of quality hires. With no structured alumni program in place and only 3% of hires coming from former employees, Lien needed to attract and engage this audience. The goal was to increase alumni hiring to 20%, reducing recruitment and onboarding costs whilst increasing employee engagement and retention.
With budgetary restraints, Lien was keen to identify a cost-effective technology solution to extend the current Mandarin Oriental Colleague experience to alumni. “We steered away from traditional recruitment marketing channels used to drive alumni programmes. To deliver a branded, immersive alumni experience, we sought a solution that was flexible, customisablecustomizable and user-friendly.”
“Given the complexity of times, we shifted our focus on fortifying the Group’s employer brand positioning to attract untapped talent communities. We needed a technology vehicle to facilitate that.”
Lien Chu, Director, Human Resources and Talent Acquisition,
Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group
The solution
PageUp partnered with Mandarin Oriental to deliver a recruitment marketing solution that creates an exclusive and engaging experience for alumni, known as their ‘Forever Fans’.
A dedicated landing page was created to allow alumni to easily register and interact with the content on the ‘Forever Fans’ portal. Behind the scenes, Lien can quickly update the landing pages with fresh company news, videos, and blogs based on alumni feedback. “The ability to engage with the alumni by sending out newsletters and customising it so that it was on brand to Mandarin Oriental is hugely important to us.” says Lien. “I appreciate the flexibility that the technology allows me”.
Lien is also leveraging the powerful CRM capability of the PageUp Recruitment Marketing platform to easily search her alumni network for right-fit talent. “If I’m looking for an Executive Chef in a particular location, I love that I am able to look into the alumni database, quickly identify who is a current or former Executive Chef and be able to approach the alumnus. Building the alumni community is effectively building a talent pool.”
When it comes to working with PageUp, Lien appreciates the personalised approach. “The PageUp team recognisesrecognizes there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution for their clients. I appreciate that they recognisedrecognized our unique set of challenges and partnered with us in the journey to achieve the best possible outcome.”
Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group Case Study
Paul Clark has been Group Director of Human Resources at Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group for over a decade, and enjoyed an extensive HR career before that in Luxembourg and Singapore. Together with HR Systems Manager at the hotel group, Danny Wan, he’s implemented PageUp Recruitment software across Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group’s hotels in the Asia-Pacific, the Americas, Europe, the Middle-East and Africa.
The challenge
Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group was seeking recruitment software which met the following selection criteria:
- current technology and a best practice user experience
- multiple language support
- mobile access
- integration with job boards and social media platforms
- increasing adoption from regional HR teams
- reporting and people analytics
“At that stage we were unable to provide the candidate solution in certain languages,” explains Clark. “As a result, it was very difficult for us to produce and analyse recruitment metrics. For example, we were struggling to determine what the source of hire was,” he says.
In some regions there were HR specialists focused on recruitment, and in others busy HR generalists with competing priorities. “We were looking for a solution that was going to get us to full adoption, was going to be a user-friendly tool for both HR teams and candidates,” says Clark.
The solution
Wan put together a comprehensive RFP which included current technology and user experience, multiple language support, complete mobile accessibility, integration with global job boards and social media platforms and reports out-of-the box so that high adoption could be achieved.
He also added some other must-haves. To ensure high adoption, the recruiting software had to be easy to use, with flexible workflows and simple approval processes. It had to provide one elegant solution, so integration with talent assessment tools was essential. He also wanted people recruiting to be able to easily manage candidate relationships and the overall experience for candidates to be easy and reflect well on the hotel group. So that internal and existing candidates weren’t overlooked, it was essential that searching for talent was simple.
“When we went through the process of soliciting proposals from different companies we were also looking for the company that was able to satisfy the needs of our hotels and teams globally,” says Clark. “We found when we were speaking with the PageUp team initially that there was a lot of success demonstrated in Asia and we had the confidence that we would be able to use the tool globally.”
In addition to experience in the regions Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group operates, Clark stresses the importance of partnership. “What we were looking for was a very positive working relationship with each part of the team – whether that be the sales team, the implementation team or indeed the ongoing support team,” he says.
“We found when we were speaking with the PageUp team that there was a lot of success demonstrated in Asia and we had the confidence that we would be able to use the tool globally.”
– Paul Clark, Group Director of Human Resources, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group
The results
“The first moment of truth when you’re engaging with vendors tends to be the relationship that you strike up with them and whether you feel comfortable with the individuals – and that was very positive,” says Clark.
The team at Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group has experienced increased efficiencies and improvements to the overall recruitment processes since the implementation of PageUp Recruitment. The PageUp platform has enabled the group to reach and attract a wider demographic of candidates, resulting in a surge of applicant volume. “With a 70% increase in applications since the start of PageUp integration, we are now able to activate strategic talent pooling and pipelining to facilitate the hiring of quality talent and higher applicant-to-hire conversion ratios. PageUp will be a great vehicle to support the next phase in elevating our recruitment lifecycle,” says Lien Chu, Director Human Resources and Talent Acquisition.
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