Flight Centre - PageUp

Three standout metrics

$35,000

cost saving per alumni hire

45%

of hires from alumni channel

4 hours

average time to hire for alumni

The voice of the customer

“I remember the conversation well: PageUp suggesting they could help us during the pandemic. We only had one recruiter, and we weren’t recruiting. But the alumni was a genius opportunity to use recruitment marketing to re-engage our people that we had to let go of previously.”

Allisa O’Connell, Head of People and Culture, Flight Centre Travel Group

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What wasn’t working

Flight Centre is one of the world’s largest travel companies, proudly Australian-owned with a market cap of $3.6B and offices in 23 countries. When COVID-19 forced border closures and grounded flights overnight, Flight Centre had to make the hard decision to furlough and let go swathes of staff – the business model was no longer viable.

Post-pandemic, amidst a boom in demand for travel and tourism, Flight Centre faced fresh challenges:

Tight talent market meant operating at 100% capacity whilst carrying 500 rolling open roles for 12 months;
Needed to retain current staff and manage risk of employee burnout;
Traditional channels like job boards took 95 applications to fill one role, delivering poor ROI.

The turning point

Allisa O’Connell, Head of People and Culture, and her team focused on three areas: Recruit, Retain, and Return. Starting with their home market of Australia as a test-case, they evaluated sourcing channels and discovered that 40% of hires came from people movement: internal candidates, ex-employees or employee referrals. It was time to re-engage their alumni.

RealisingRealizing they could use recruitment marketing functionality to reconnect with past ‘Flighties’, Flight Centre partnered with PageUp to scale up their post-pandemic recruitment at speed.

The shift began in three phases:

‘Forever Flighties’ alumni campaign

The team launched a dedicated alumni programme to re-engage furloughed talent, reconnect them with the Flight Centre community and remove any stigma or barriers around returning.
Embedding the alumni programme in offboarding

RecognisingRecognizing they’d lose people in the Great Resignation, the team made the alumni programme part of the offboarding process, encouraging ex-employees to stay connected.
Creating ‘Australia’s Got Talent’ internal site

Using PageUp the team created an internal careers site where employees can explore new roles and register areas of interest, facilitating internal mobility.

The solution in action

Flight Centre successfully created an innovative talent acquisition strategy centred on alumni networks, achieving dramatic cost savings and time-to-hire whilst maintaining their strong culture using PageUp.

Key initiatives included:

‘Forever Flighties’ dedicated career site

Alumni have a dedicated career site and custom landing pages they can contribute to, where ‘Flighties’ share stories and photos about their time working with Flight Centre.
Specific alumni content

Sharing news, jobs, past alumni stories and blogs keep alumni networks informed about the business and up to date with job openings.
Automated nurture campaigns

PageUp’s automated email campaigns nurtures the alumni network at scale without manual effort.
Effective internal mobility platform

Using their internal “Australia’s Got Talent” careers site helps drive internal mobility, taking just 6 applicants to fill one role compared to 95 for traditional channels.
Reducing barriers to return

Keeping ex-Flighties engaged and making return to the business normal led to 99% of previous employees wanting to re-engage post-pandemics.

The impact

Hard ROI

$700,000+ total initial recruitment cost savings
$35,000 cost saving per alumni hire
45% total hires from alumni channel
4 hours alumni time to hire

Soft ROI

Alumni reach competency and sales productivity in 30 days vs 6 months for new hires.
Strong Flight Centre culture maintained despite difficult downsizing decisions.
99% of previous employees wanted to re-engage with Flight Centre.
Alumni programme firmly embedded in offboarding process.

What surprised us the most

“When we were ready to re-engage with alumni, we sent out an email and were overwhelmed by the positive response. Over 99% of our previous employees wanted to re-engage with us. This speaks to the power of the community that we have created and nurtured through the ‘Forever Flighties’ campaign.”

Allisa O’Connell, Head of People and Culture, Flight Centre Travel Group