SUCCESS STORY

The pandemic caused a talent crunch in the tech industry. Tech usage spiked during the pandemic, forcing firms to quickly scale up their teams to accommodate increased demand. This influx of new workers, combined with the abrupt transition to remote work, created a secondary challenge: how to train and develop new employees when there’s no office and no in-person communication and instruction. Many tech workers reported feeling alienated from their new employers and colleagues, and tech executives bemoaned the lack of effective employee development tools for a remote workforce. Workers and their organizations felt disengaged from each other and there was a distinct lack of a company culture. This problem was acutely felt at BMC, a multinational third-party IT company whose services were in high demand amid the early days of the pandemic.

BMC expanded its use of LinkedIn to streamline its recruiting process and hire a steady pipeline of IT professionals. BMC then added LinkedIn Learning to its talent tech stack, making it more effective at developing those new employees and increasing their engagement with the organization.

THE CHALLENGE

Macroeconomic changes yields opportunity

BMC wasn’t the only IT firm looking to scale its staffing capacity. All across the industry, firms were scrambling to get good people in the door. If BMC wanted to increase its headcount without sacrificing its quality of service, it would need to move faster and recruit more efficiently than its competitors.

Once hired, BMC had to develop its new employees at the same scale. Prior to the pandemic, BMC’s approach to employee development was to hold in-person training sessions conducted by outside vendors. Because BMC used an array of vendors across its global offices in Texas, India, Israel, and the UK, the development program wasn’t standardized. Based on employee feedback, leadership felt that there was a stronger opportunity to enhance employee development.

This situation was exacerbated by the pandemic. BMC was hiring quickly, but it was having trouble retaining workers given the competitive macroenvironment. BMC had to address these challenges with a relatively small talent team. The company has 23 employees in its talent division, whereas its competitors typically have three times as many. If BMC were to succeed, it would need to be scrappy, scalable and efficient.

THE SOLUTION

Hire quickly with LinkedIn Insights, standardize training offerings and improve employee engagement with LinkedIn Learning

BMC had already had success using LinkedIn Recruiter, and it built upon that foundation to increase its hiring capacity during the pandemic tech surge. LinkedIn Insights helped BMC identify qualified candidates in real-time. Using proactive alerts, BMC monitored its competitors’ acquisition strategies and received updates the moment certain candidates hit the job market or exhibited interest in new opportunities. LinkedIn’s automation tools ensured BMC always had up-to-date information about a candidate’s status, and a custom integration with LinkedIn allowed BMC to contact candidates all from one comprehensive platform. As a result, BMC was able to fulfill its needs despite an industry-wide scramble for talent. With its recruitment system optimized, BMC focused its efforts on building an e-training solution program that fits the realities of remote work.

In an effort to make its HR operations more streamlined, BMC decided to build upon its pre-existing relationship with LinkedIn and make LinkedIn Learning, LinkedIn’s career development platform, a focal point of its training efforts. Working with just one vendor, as opposed to several, allowed for more standardized measurement. All of the data was centralized in one platform, letting managers across the organization make apples to apple comparisons about employees’ development progress. Unlike in person training sessions,

LinkedIn Learning afforded BMC employees the luxury of flexibility. Instead of attending an in-person training session at a set time, LinkedIn Learning’s online training modules could be completed on an employee’s schedule. The platform also offered a robust curriculum, with more than 20,000 courses across business, creative, and technical categories for employees to choose from.

LinkedIn Learning increased engagement on all sides. Employees were more engaged with the training process because they could choose from a variety of classes and complete them at their discretion. And managers were more engaged because they could more effectively track employee participation and progress in the program. BMC is so happy with the results that it's looking to expand its use of LinkedIn Learning to include planned curriculums for different departments in the organization and standardized benchmarks for employee development. BMC's successes with LinkedIn shows how investing in the platform and standardizing talent operations can reap benefits for an organization.