FEDEX GETS ON TRACK WITH STRAIGHTSOURCE RECRUITMENT SOLUTIONS FOR CUSTOMER REPRESENTATIVES
FedEx Repackages Critical Business Function to Deliver On-Time Results

The Challenge
The Solution
The Results

The Challenge
Timing is everything at FedEx, a company that is built upon maintaining a complex, precise, and reliable operation with its people at the core of its shipping success. From jumbo-jet pilots to computer networking experts, and package handlers to couriers and customer representatives, each employee plays a pivotal role in ensuring FedEx success. Recruiting, hiring, and retaining such a large and diverse workforce is vital for FedEx to deliver the service expected by its customers.

Faced with a highly competitive market for customer representatives throughout the country, FedEx needed to improve its staffing process to build a competitive differentiator. FedEx in conjunction with the industry group, Call Centers of Excellence, studied its call center staffing. The findings? Recruiting process had a significant bearing on employee retention.

"Call centers are rapidly emerging as a vital function within customer-focused businesses; therefore, recruiting the best employees is paramount," said Randy Overton, senior manager, Network Operations Support, Customer Service at FedEx. Armed with this data, FedEx realized a need to repackage and fundamentally improve its recruiting process and maintain its perception as an "employer of choice."

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The Solution
FedEx's recruitment needs extended to a wide range of operational categories, and its internal recruitment group was challenged to adapt its proven processes to fit the unique recruiting requirements of customer service centers. According to Overton, the internal recruitment process grouped customer representatives with all other operations Ñ couriers and package handlers, for example Ñ rather than focusing on the unique skills required for high-quality customer representative candidates.

As Overton decided on the best course of action, he saw a presentation by Sprint PCS on its recruitment and selection of customer representatives. Sprint PCS, also a participant in the Call Centers of Excellence, had implemented one of the country's premier customer-care center operations. "We could totally relate to Sprint PCS and its recruitment pain points," commented Overton. And after hearing the company tout the benefits of their recruitment partner, StraightSource, he was compelled to visit Sprint PCS and see the operation for himself.

"I was impressed that the recruiting process was totally transparent to the candidate, the high levels of energy, thoroughness, and excitement StraightSource pumped into the process, and how professionally they represented Sprint PCS."

So shortly thereafter, FedEx tapped StraightSource to help further improve its call center recruiting process. "We wanted to apply the same levels of excitement and precision we saw during the site visit to our recruitment needs," Overton said. While FedEx already had candidate selection tools and wanted to avoid any wholesale changes in that area, StraightSource's extensive experience in mass hiring proved to be a boon as the companies worked in tandem to supplement his existing tools with custom solutions for recruiting FedEx customer representatives.

StraightSource implemented marketing campaigns in the target cities to generate large candidate pools. In some markets, FedEx staged job fairs run by the StraightSource team. In other locations, the company used the "open house" approach. "We encountered instances where we had to modify our approach during the hiring process. On short notice, StraightSource could quickly and efficiently adapt to accommodate these situations," Overton added. Additionally, StraightSource "immediately handled each request" to track additional steps in the hiring process and conduct in-depth recruitment analyses in select centers. The results were irrefutable.

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The Results
With its hands-on, inclusive, high-touch process StraightSource:

• Managed all aspects of recruiting potential candidates, including organizing job fairs and open houses, managing the events, supporting daily candidate receipt, and tracking candidate information.
• Leveraged its database to track all relevant candidate information from initial introduction, application process, interviews, hire/not hire decision, through to new-hire training.
• Increased candidate pool per start class by 54%, affording greater selection practices.
• Off-loaded approximately 120 management hours per class.
• Improved training graduation by 17%.
• Improved retention by 27%.

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