[EXPERT TALK] Talent branding with Flipkart’s Richa Telang

Talent branding is one of the emerging and challenging facets of recruitment. Interestingly, a lot of younger companies are doing a great job at this as compared to traditional brands. Flipkart is one of India’s top e-commerce marketplaces taking on the might of global rivals. They recently revamped their career site with a lot of great additions. Not only is the experience rich, it is also right on the money. We spoke to Richa Telang, Head of Talent Branding at Flipkart on her journey of building this new age career site and creating a grand new experience for their audience.

Q1.: What inspired you to upgrade to this new career site?

Richa: The number of people wanting to join Flipkart was rising rapidly and we had to figure out an efficient way to engage each one of them. We wished to inform them about the openings, bring them up to speed on the prerequisites, and resolve all their queries without leaving any room for ambiguity. Being a well-known brand on the Internet brings with it the risk of misinformation, rumours, etc. We wanted to eliminate the same from affecting our TA’s considerations and decisions. Hence, a dedicated career website was the perfect solution; a seamless and informative site that catered to all jobseekers.

Q2.: How did you convince the stakeholders? What were their initial thoughts on this?

Richa: Our stakeholders were completely supportive and encouraging of the idea. Once we tabled the project, we had a complete buy-in. Most of them knew how important it was to engage jobseekers in order to sustain our continued growth. One of the key thoughts that came up was that:

We needed to treat our jobseekers just the way we treat our customers.

From thereon, we crafted a roadmap - for the career website - that was built upon the many ideas and theories we employ in order to delight our customers.

Q3.: What were some facets that you covered on the journey of creation?

Richa: Information and user-friendliness were our foremost priorities. However, we also wanted the website to offer a lot more than just detail. We wanted it to represent our culture - the way we speak, our attitude towards work and progress, and so on. Therefore, we resorted to adopting a friendly tone of voice in terms of what we wrote and the visuals we employed.

Q4.: How do the metrics look like? Has the views and applications increased?

Richa: We’ve just recently launched the website and hence, we need to wait some time out before we get to closely analysing its performance. However, the website is getting a lot of traction and the same is translating into increased conversation on our social pages. It has also led to an increased interest in our work culture among passive candidates.

Q5.: How has this change impacted Flipkart’s talent brand and your candidate experience?

Richa: There’s a lot more clarity about who we are and what we do at Flipkart post the launch of this website. The Talent Brand, therefore, is now able to weed out redundancies in terms of hiring queries as well as engage with the right set of people; candidates Flipkart wishes to on-board. Consequently, the candidate experience has also improved by leaps and bounds since most of the people approaching us come equipped with a clear thought of knowing more about us and/or joining our teams.

Q6.: What was the thought process around including e-commerce stats, the Flinterns program, Technovation, Flipskool, and the Founder’s journey?

Richa: We wanted people to know that we are more than an online store with cool workplaces. There is so much innovation happening at Flipkart as we speak and it’s impossible to capture it all in a job description. In addition, we also wanted people to know what we do for our employees in terms of supporting them in every stage of their life. Flipkart has some of the best benefits and perks in the industry. We are among the handful of companies that endorse work-life balance, higher education, sabbaticals, etc. We included all these subjects to give the viewer a comprehensive view about our company. It also conveys the message that we are looking for people who wish to join us for the long run.

Flipkart is known for its early adoption towards innovative ideas and a great work culture. The same holds true for their recruitment team. Kudos to Richa and her team for bringing both innovation and their culture out for the world to see and appreciate!

(Image Credits: www.flipkartcareers.com)