ALORICA, the largest BPO in the US and among the top 5 BPO players in the Philippines, partners with Xurpas Enterprise and STORM Technologies to accelerate talent acquisition and to increase employee engagement through an incentives-based motivational platform.
(from left to right) Raymond Racaza, President & COO of Xurpas; Peter Cauton, CEO of STORM Technologies; Marcy K. Venezuela, President & CEO of Xurpas Enterprise; Bong Borja, President of Alorica Asia; Atty. Jamea Garcia, Vice President for HR of Alorica Asia; and Marvin Vinluan, Director for Recruitment of Alorica Philippines
With almost 40,000 employees located in 17 sites nationwide, recruitment and employee engagement is a crucial concern. “To hire one person, you need to go through at least fifteen people,” says. Atty. Jamea Garcia, Vice President of Human Resources for Alorica Asia. To meet their hiring requirements, Alorica utilizes various channels such as job fairs, academic linkages, and online sources – all of which can be expensive to implement.
However, they found out that their top source of successful hires is through employee referrals. “It basically gives us about 40% of our hires. [We also find that] employees from referrals have a higher retention rate at 70% as compared to other sourcing channels,” shares Marvin Vinluan, Director of Strategic Sourcing and Recruitment Marketing for Alorica Philippines.
Because of the success of the program, employees have been encouraged to refer their friends. These referrals have been manually tracked using application forms, emails, and Excel. However, this manual system has proven to be a tedious process to maintain. “There are cases when we encounter duplicate referrals,” cites Vinluan. In addition, incentivizing has become more challenging. Since rewards normally come in the form of mobile phones, gadgets and even home theater systems, finding in-house space to store these items and getting employees to bring them home have added to the administrative burden.
“Because of the size and scale we recruit, we needed to find innovative ways where we can recruit people, and encourage [employees] to bring people to the hubs to generate employment. It can’t always be traditional methods. You have to think of new ways and you also have to leverage on technology,” says Atty. Garcia.
To address these issues, Xurpas Enterprise is delivering an Employee Referral System (ERS) to automate the acceptance of referrals and track leads more efficiently, enabling the company to streamline internal processes and generate company savings.
To motivate and reward employees with successful referrals, the ERS will be integrated with Kudos, a online rewards and recognition platform by Xurpas subsidiary STORM Technologies. Using the platform, Alorica can reward its employees with digital points, which can then be used to redeem items via STORM’s exclusive marketplace. Employees can customize their rewards by choosing from over 15,000 products and services available in the marketplace, which is backed by a managed merchant ecosystem, full customer support operations, and analytics. The platform also features a virtual leaderboard that enables real-time social recognition.
“We are working together to make this really successful. The objective of the project is to make our lives better from the employees’ perspective to the employers’ perspective…With the manual system [of processing referrals]…we are [getting] 40% of [successful hires],” explains Vinluan. “We look forward to increasing that 40% to maybe 50% or 60%.”
“The major challenge for us [is to] really maximize the potential of our employee referral system,” says Vinluan. “I’m very positive with this. Now we’re trying it for recruitment, I’m sure we can use the technology for other things as well. There’s a lot of new exciting things happening with Alorica. We’re really looking at a brighter future for everyone here,” Garcia concludes.
A subsidiary of Xurpas Inc., STORM provides HR solutions as part of the solutions portfolio of Xurpas Enterprise, the country’s leading provider of digital innovation platforms for businesses in the areas of employee engagement and retention, digital advertising, IT and managed services, and data sciences. It consists of seven subsidiaries with operations throughout Asia, servicing top local and Fortune 500 companies.