Flight Centre Travel Group was among the first and hardest hit by COVID-19. But in the face of adversity, and buoyed by a resilient culture, the Flight Centre team has re-hired and re-deployed their valued ex-‘Flighties’ using PageUp Recruitment Marketing technology. The results speak for themselves:
- 86 new recruits in the first 3 months since launch
- A saving of $35,000 per hire
Hear how Allisa O’Connell, Head of People and Culture, Flight Centre built a successful alumni (ex-employee) network from the ground up – and with limited budget.
Full transcript
Speaker: Allisa O’Connell, Head of People and Culture, Flight Centre Travel Group.
We are one of the world’s largest travel companies both in retail and corporate travel. We are Australian owned. We opened in 1982 in Sydney. And after that, we had a thousand stores in Australia and 10,000 people in Australia, 24,000 people globally.
And then COVID hit. We now have 3,800 people in Australia, 10,000 people globally, and a market cap of only 3.6 billion. I say only because we have seen a significant downgrade of our organization. So we fortunately got to live through the last 12 months.
What was the challenge? Well, for us, we had a government mandated closure of industry. When COVID hit and our Prime Minister decided to close our borders, 70% of our travel was international. 30% in leisure was domestic and in corporate it was about a 60, 40 split the other way. But we suddenly were confronted with the fact we no longer had a viable business. We no longer had a viable business model and we had to move very quickly.
There was one stage where we sat on our Level 15 over at South Point and looked at our cash runway and realized we had three months worth of cash until our business was defunct. So it was like having a gun held at your head and someone saying, “Come on, what are the answers? “What are the answers?” So we moved very quickly.
We actually had to decide what we were going to do with our business. Were we going to remain in leisure and corporate travel? We had customers demanding and needing refunds. Both domestic and international travel was affected. And we really had no revenue streams. In fact, we saw over a billion dollars be paid back to customers in refunds. So we were confronted with some unusual circumstances.
And as you heard before, I’ve been in the industry, well, I’ve been in the industry and Flight Center for 33 years. And I have never been confronted with such a sharp, extraordinary event as COVID hit our business.
We had to stand down the majority of our staff. We actually stood down over 7,000 people and we then had to go about making 5,500 of those people redundant. So that was a challenging and difficult set of circumstances to find ourselves in.
We were all asked at a business level to discern who we needed for the next two years. And that team were the only team that could stay. Everyone else either had to be stood down or eventually made redundant. That was unusual. And when we very first had an engagement with PageUp to ask how we could work together, I remember sitting in the room with Sam, my head of talent, thinking what the hell are we gonna say to these guys?
What do we need to work with PageUp for? We’re not gonna recruit for the next two years or so we thought at the time. But we needed to find a solution to the problem of telling 7,000 people or 5,500 people that we didn’t have an opportunity to have a job for them, that they might’ve been career Flight Center people who loved us and wanted to stay but we had no roles for them to do.
So, what does recruitment look like for us now and into the future? Even though our businesses were telling us they didn’t need to recruit for two years, we always knew there was an element of lies in that. We kept actually one recruiter that became two, which has now become four recruiters over the last four months. But at the time we had to remove a really large acquisition talent acquisition team. Let them go and keep one person because we didn’t believe we’d be recruiting.
We had been exposed to PageUp, they are our partner. We wanted to work with them on what it looked like to have recruitment marketing, moving into the future. We did have a budget. We even had a recruitment marketer. We have no budget. We have no recruitment marketer. We have, like I said, four recruiters for our 3,500 people. So we sat down together and we sat down with PageUp to work out what other organizations were doing and how we could actually communicate with and work with the people that had left us.
So the 7,000 people that were stood down which then became five and a half thousand people we made redundant, how would we engage them? How would we keep them excited about Flight Center and give them opportunities to return?
We created an Alumni network, which we worked with PageUp on to have recruitment marketing, targeted communications, opportunity for automated workflows which took it out of the hands of our recruitment team and ensure that we could keep in contact with it and build that opportunity.
What we had to do because as I told you, we had no budget, in fact, we were given a COVID spend and each and every month I had to be able to explain why we were living or not living within our means to the cent. Because we had no revenue, and we understood that every spend meant that our cash runway was diminishing. So our one recruiter each month would have to fill the roles that we had, and if we weren’t able to fill them we’d have to beg and plead for another recruiter or another way to actually attract talent.
We needed to figure out what was a business case that we could propose to the business to show them that the opportunity that we were being provided by PageUp to create an Alumni was not just a dream but it was something that was real and substantive to support our recruiters. So we worked really hard. We knew what it costs to recruit someone in our business. We knew what it cost to attract someone. We actually had a very large attraction and retention team previously. So we understood exactly what it costs to bring a candidate to the doors.
There’d also been a change in our business. In the past, the applicants that we were predominantly recruiting were retail consultants to work in our retail store network, not professional staff to work in our office. But with COVID, we no longer needed to recruit retail stores staff because we actually had no retail stores or diminished we’re now sitting at 250 down from a thousand. So that shows you the change in our network.
But we needed to find developers. We needed to find data experts. We needed to find more finance people. So there was a change in who we were bringing to the business. We realized and understood the cost of going to externals to bring these candidates to the door. And we created a really strong ROI that proved the cost of our investment in the recruitment marketing opportunity we had with PageUp would be resolved in only two hires.
For us as a company, if we made an investment to work with PageUp I knew that we would return that after two hires. In fact, as I was putting the business case together to take to our executive team, one of our businesses went external to a recruiter to place two people. And I was able to walk into the executive team and say, “Here’s the business case. “Oh, and by the way “it was already spent by person X in two recruits.” So that was a fantastic opportunity for me to show the significance of what we’re involving ourselves in.
It’s a $45,000 investment to recruit someone new and then six months for someone really to be up and running in our business as a retail consultant. We knew that if we could keep in touch with our consultants who left us, we could bring them back, and just by doing a simple risk check and an HR check. We’d have a candidate ready to go, who knew our business, who knew our culture, who was capable and already trained.
Not only did we not have to invest in recruitment and recruitment marketing, we also did not have to recruit in any ongoing development, which was a huge saving for us because we only had three trainers.
So what does our Alumni look like? Forever Flighties is our opportunity to reach those who’ve left our business. If you get to have a look at our site, which is from the PageUp marketing support that we were given, we actually make it very emotive and it’s positioned to ex Flight Center employees. So if you join this page and you weren’t a Flight Center person, it probably won’t have the same sentimental value. It speaks directly to Flight Center ex-employees. It shows pictures of things that are important to us, like our global ball. It shows pictures of our staff. There’s a fantastic video that replays a lot of our memories with peoples in it and the voiceover is very emotive. Speaking to the things that are important to us as Flighties that, we have this saying internally that you can leave Flight Center but you’ll always come back, it’s Hotel California. You’ll forever be a Flightie. And the whole page and the sentiment on here speaks exactly to that. So it’s pitched to ex-employees.
Our team did a fantastic job of creating the content, so it was rich. People felt like it was theirs and they attached to it and understood what it was about. And I’m pleased to say that when we launched this to our 7,000 people who were then still stood down, we got a 99% re-engagement. In fact, we got five people who told us to take our Alumni and don’t come back. The rest of our ex-employees were interested and wanted to understand more. It didn’t mean that they all necessarily stood signed up but they were certainly interested in what we had to offer and being involved in it.
We then went out on LinkedIn, our Managing Director of Australia posted, I posted, we got a great amount of support and interest from LinkedIn. Our People & Culture team all did the same thing, went to their social network. I saw a lot on Facebook ’cause I’m an old woman, obviously as Mike has already told you. Also a lot of my friends, ex Flighties posting what a fantastic initiative, how they were pleased to be involved in it, how they’d joined up.
It hit the market, was highly emotive. It was speaking to our brand. It was speaking to those people that were stood down and allowing them to stay connected. Now those stood down people were then made redundant, a lot of them, but they still wanted to be kept engaged. So what actually did we derive from this? What is the ROI? How did it all go? Well, those are the rehires. I can tell you that this slide is actually wrong. As at last week it was 46 people, but as at today, we have had 86 hires since the 22nd of February when we launched our Alumni. So that’s 86 candidates, ex Flight Center staff who have rejoined the business at no cost other than our additional outlay to create this site. So no training, no recruitment time. Simply put the job out there, through the system as we have it, we can identify where people have worked before, the skills, the capabilities, we can match the right job ad to the right candidates. They want to come back.
All of our people know that we didn’t create the COVID circumstances, and most of those people want the opportunity to return. So when we can put the right job offer in front of those people, where they have the right capabilities it’s just a simple match, Tinder opportunity.
When we did launch it, 21% of people came to the site. 46 of those registered their interest. Like I said, 99% of people were keen to stay reengaged. In terms of our productivity, there’s no productivity loss. When we can employ someone and bring them back into the business they immediately can pick up the role they were in previously or move to a different part of the business. But because they’ve already been culturally part of Flight Center, it’s an easy transition for them.
The onboarding process is very simple and our cost is minimal. We think that using the Alumni, it’s about a 35,000 case saving for us. But when I look at that 86 people that we’ve managed to recruit, you know, we have exponentially been rewarded for the investment that we’ve made. We talked about a saving of 700K. I think the saving is considerably more for us because what we’ve been able to do is match people who have not necessarily the same role that they were in but where we have roles existing, we can simply invite an ex Flightie to take on that role as a transition back into the company. So you don’t have to put people back into the same role, it’s a way to bring them back into the business. They can do a contracted role for a period of time and then we move them throughout the business.
For us it has been an extremely exciting opportunity to be involved with PageUp and to have the Alumni. I would say the 86 people who have been reemployed are delighted, as well as our 5,000 people who have engaged with us. And the engagement level is high from our people, and we hope that it is the easiest way to keep our talent pool warm and excited and part of our business.
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