Volvo Cars Develops a Digital Recruitment Process using Recright for its Global Graduate Program

Volvo Cars’ Global Graduate Program is a career boosting program designed to help young talent from all around the world excel. When considering candidates for this program, Volvo Cars looks for their potential as future leaders in a global organization. The people who get hired have a permanent employee contract from the start.

 

Volvo Cars began using Recight’s video interviewing platform in December 2019 to screen candidates for this program more efficiently.

Volvo Cars’ screening process for its Global Graduate Program previously included more manual CV screening and in-person candidate assessment centers. In past years, Volvo Cars had in-person assessment centers, where candidates would present cases and meet.

“It was great to meet candidates in real life, but when looking at it from both a time management standpoint and also a sustainability standpoint, we asked ourselves whether all our efforts were justifiable,” says Linda Wall, Recruiter at Volvo Cars.

The recruitment team also used telephone screening and Skype calls, and would share verbal feedback about candidates with hiring managers.

Kristin Lövgren, Senior Recruiter at Volvo Cars realized the need to make the process more efficient. “We saw that screening candidates this way was time consuming. It all comes down to where we’re putting our time,” she explains.

This year, they launched a digital recruitment strategy, which included using Recright in the screening process to narrow down their top candidates. “It was a whole new process for the Global Graduate Program this year. In earlier years, a lot more people had to put a lot more time into it. By making the whole process digital and by using Recright, we got more flexibility for the internal stakeholders and also for the candidates,” says Linda.

Narrowing down the top candidates with video interviews

When considering different video interviewing platforms, Volvo Cars was looking for a user-friendly solution—both for them and for candidates. Recright met their needs as a global company since the platform was flexible, had the language options they needed, integrated with their applicant tracking system, and made it easy for everyone to access the platform.

Linda explains that the implementation process was effortless: “Recright is very user friendly. There was quick support, and never an issue with anything even from the start.”

This year, Volvo Cars had around 4,200 applications for the Global Graduate Program. Three recruiters first narrowed down their top 300 candidates through CV screening and assessments. Next, they invited those 300 candidates to participate in video interviews through Recright, and then selected the top 100 based on the video responses.

The recruitment team set up an interview and screening template where they outlined what type of answers they were looking for. For the video interviews, some of the things they asked candidates to share were:

 

- A valuable leadership experience
- A time where they had to take the initiative to solve a problem
- A time when they had difficulties collaborating
- Something new they decided to learn more about in the past year, and why

 

After evaluating the video responses, the recruiters sent their top candidates to the hiring managers. “The benefit is that recruiters look at the same video interview as the manager does. Instead of getting our feedback, the manager gets to see the interview responses directly,” explains Kristin.

 

“Recright lets us see how a person acts without meeting them,” adds Linda. “The candidates were also able to get creative. We had one candidate who talked about how he had taken up swimming. And for that answer, he put on swimming goggles to make it more fun. It brought us a laugh and it made us remember that candidate—he stood out,” she continues.

Volvo Cars at the forefront of digital recruitment

By switching to a digital recruitment process and using Recright to screen candidates, Volvo Cars has saved time, involved fewer people, and ultimately saved money.

“The recruitment process would have required more time from more people if we weren’t using Recright,” says Linda.

Kristin explains the value of video interviews in big recruitment projects: “It’s much more efficient to use a video interview tool instead of scheduling sessions with candidates. We don’t have to sit down and schedule all the interviews and contact people. It makes jobs more flexible and easier to manage.”

Volvo Cars also saw a high response rate from candidates, and received positive feedback about their recruitment process. “The fact that we made it digital and dared to do things in a different way puts us at the forefront of digital recruitment,” says Linda.

Tips recruitment teams using video interviews

Volvo Cars is following this digital recruitment process for other big hiring projects, such as for summer jobs and thesis work through the Volvo Engineering Student Concept (VESC).

 

Linda shares her advice for other companies using video interviews. “Keep a minimum amount of questions (between 3-4)—you can quite quickly pick out which candidates to move forward with. Think about how to ask questions to get the most out of candidates’ answers, and try to vary the type of questions you ask.”

 

For next year’s Global Graduate process, Volvo Cars would like to use Recright’s timed interviews feature, where candidates can’t re-record their answers, to see how that changes their candidate selection process.