Our candidate-focused talent journey

How do we as a Talent Acquisition team at BlaBlaCar create a positive candidate experience while supporting our business growth?

Having been part of the Talent Acquisition team at BlaBlaCar for the past 1.5 years, I have seen that candidate experience is at the heart of our hiring efforts and long-term projects. It is one of our key drivers in the team — but how do we manage to keep the candidate at the core of everything we do?

Team structure & scope

In order to be able to fully commit to a positive candidate experience, our Talent Acquisition team is well staffed and well structured to begin with.

As Talent Acquisition Managers, we have a clear hiring scope of either Engineering, Product, Communications, General & Administrative, or New Business.

We limit the number of positions to fill per recruiter. This allows us to both build expertise within the scope we are hiring for and also have sufficient time for each candidate; to support and guide candidates throughout the process, to cheer them on, to share in-depth and personal feedback, both when hired and when not hired. Rejections are never easy to deliver, so we want to make the feedback as valuable as possible for our applicants.

Candidate feedback

Candidate feedback is something we proactively ask for. Our candidate experience survey is sent through our ATS to each candidate that reached the recruiter assessment stage or moved further in the process. It helps us to better understand our strengths and pain points in our recruiting process. For example, we would ask if candidates perceived our communication as transparent and clear regarding the role and team, as well as all steps of the hiring process.

Candidates are our main stakeholders and show us their reality of our efforts; and we embrace their feedback to further bloom in our role!

This goes along with our newbie interviews we have put in place together with the Employer Branding team. By meeting with new employees, we receive qualitative feedback on the personal hiring and interviewing experience of new team members. Both our candidate experience survey as well as our newbie interviews ensure that we can improve quickly as a team, both on Talent Acquisition and Hiring Manager’s side. These interviews have already given us more insight into the length of our hiring process, and the need to challenge its length at points.

Collaboration with Hiring Managers

As Talent Acquisition Managers, we equally promote a strong collaborative approach with Hiring Managers and interviewers. We constantly train our managers and interviewers around candidate experience; what we call Hiring Academy training. During this training, we deep dive on interview techniques, dos & don’ts and how to avoid bias, and more. We also share feedback openly with interviewers to help them grow in recruitment. Even though we are the main contact point for applicants and manage the whole process, we want to focus on the candidate at each step of the hiring journey.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Our strong focus on a positive candidate experience is also deeply rooted with BlaBlaCar’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion strategy. It is reflected in a diverse staffing across all teams and company areas as well as in various internal actions to implement this strategy on a global company level.

We consider DEI and recruitment as tightly-knit. Our goal is to create an inclusive and fair hiring process. Aside from various other actions, we promote our talents to relocate from anywhere around the globe to join BlaBlaCar. Our global team is composed of people from more than 45 countries around the world already! All our interviews are held in English and we have put in place several training sessions to sharpen our DEI understanding and responsibility as recruiters. We also closely work with our Employer Branding team to make sure that our communication towards candidates is inclusive, in our outbound emails or active sourcing messages that we send.

Data-driven mindset

We also back up our candidate experience focus and hiring approach with concrete data apart from the candidate survey. Internally, we regularly track measurable KPIs, such as time to process and time to hire, to make sure candidates move through all hiring stages quickly.

Externally, our Employer Branding team tracks additional evaluations we receive from applicants through company rating platforms among others.

As a team, we always try to make sure to keep a holistic view on all collected feedback and data points to be able to turn it into actionable insights and learn from it. This can be done through training for both the Talent Acquisition team, managers and interviewers as mentioned, but also by driving new projects or revising and challenging our processes we have put in place. We consider it key to stay innovative and open-minded when it comes to candidate experience.

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We also thrive to exchange with other recruiters, startups and scaleups to share best practices, join conferences and events around this topic — we love to learn and get better every day!

A recent project that we are working on is to further nurture and build our BlaBlaCar talent pool to be able to stay in touch with potential new team members. It helps us to reconnect with them and keep them in the loop for new positions and company updates. Being part of Komunity, we are able to recommend top candidates on the platform to help them find another company in case it does not work out with BlaBlaCar at the given time.

Fun & Serious

Last but not least, I learned about the Fun & Serious culture at BlaBlaCar during my own recruiting process before joining the team. Needless to say that I am fond of our awesome and fun Talent Acquisition team. We take our responsibility to shape people’s career path seriously while at the same time leaving lots and lots of room to together enjoy what we do. We do take fun very seriously at BlaBlaCar and strive to inspire our candidates with it every day!

Maybe you are one of our future Fun & Serious team members? Check out our current openings at jobs.blablacar.com — we would love to hear from you.