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Hybrid CMS and AI-Powered Personalization Powers Brose Recruiting Program

We needed a technology solution that offered advanced personalization capabilities to help us improve our hiring processes throughout North America. By doing a better job of analyzing applicants and targeting specific needs, we’ve reduced the time it takes to find talented employees.

Bernd M. Schell, Project Manager Online Services / Personnel Services / Brose Group

Brose is a global automotive supplier located in Europe, Asia, South America, United States, Canada and Mexico. The company has been operating in North America since 1993 and has over 6,000 employees across the region, making it the fourth largest family-owned automotive supplier in the world with over $6 billion in revenue.

To attract talented IT employees to join the team at Brose, the company deployed the FirstSpirit Digital Experience Platform (DXP) with a hybrid content management system (CMS) and AI-powered personalization tool—the Intelligent Content Engine—to improve its hiring practices. Using Crownpeak CMS (FirstSpirit) helped Brose deliver personalized content to potential new hires which better captured applicant attention, streamlined operations and accelerated the hiring process for the company.

What we like about FirstSpirit is that it provides us with data that is based on user behavior. The AI-based personalization technology helps us tremendously by identifying and prioritizing potential new hires early in the recruitment process and better engaging them with relevant content.

Susanne Dumbacher-Geyer, Analyst HR Websites / Personnel Services / Brose Group

Goal
Streamline the hiring process and provide personalized content via multiple channels to potential candidates.

Difficulties
• Outdated and inefficient content management system
• Difficult to attract qualified IT talent to grow the Brose technology team

Solution
Crownpeak CMS (FirstSpirit)

Results
• Increase IT applicants by 100% and reduce the time to finding talented employees
• Targeted recruitment based on segmentation and personalization technology reduced time to hire
• Increased efficiency based on a mobile-first, SEO-based strategy used to attract the highest quality IT professionals
• Seamless integration of Crownpeak CMS (FirstSpirit) with multiple enterprise applications and an engaging user-interface simplified the hiring process

Challenge
The human resources team at Brose needed a digital experience platform that would streamline the hiring process and provide personalized content via multiple channels to potential candidates. The existing content management system was outdated, inefficient and made it difficult to attract qualified IT talent to grow the Brose technology team.

Brose selected the FirstSpirit DXP with a powerful hybrid CMS to help drive its “Relaunch brose.com” campaign. The campaign needed a web content management solution that supported multiple languages and provided easy access to content approved by corporate headquarters, and which also provided powerful analytics capabilities to improve the hiring process.

Brose has websites across Europe, Asia, South America and North America and communicates with prospective employees across multiple social media channels—including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, XING and WeChat—making interoperability and ease of integration with other systems and channels a critical requirement. The company also needed a CMS that easily integrates with Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

These technical challenges demanded that Brose work with a content management vendor that offered an easy to deploy and scalable SaaS solution to grow over time as the company grows. The SaaS-based FirstSpirit hybrid CMS was a perfect fit. Brose chose to leverage FirstSpirit’s AI-powered personalization and analytics capabilities to support the human resources team, including Google for Jobs and the employee app which saves the HR team hours of work by reducing duplication and errors.

One of the features that is most helpful about FirstSpirit is how easy the technology is to use. Our HR team is creative and technically-savvy which means we’re able to design programs and use content that works throughout each of the regions we support regardless of which channels those regions use for recruitment.

Bernd M. Schell, Project Manager Online Services / Personnel Services / Brose Group

Solution

Tailoring digital content simplifies recruitment and hiring

For a company that recruits new employees from countries throughout the entire world, it’s critical that the HR team can personalize targeted outreach across multiple channels. For Brose, what stood out with FirstSpirit was how easy it was for the HR team to personalize communication with prospective employees, understand online behavior of different target groups, and incorporate geolocation aspects of searches – all in a digitally safe setting addressing full privacy and compliance regulations.
Brose felt it was very important to measure the impact of using FirstSpirit and created a set of KPIs to track the HR team’s goals. The team reports on metrics to gauge the success of campaigns and conversion rates which helps them improve their hiring practices.

Results

Crownpeak drives growth for Brose

Agility

Tapping into the power of the FirstSpirit hybrid CMS has allowed Brose’s HR team to become more agile by empowering employees to operate independently in their regions, and help them leverage data to increase personalized outreach to prospects. FirstSpirit is so easy to use that HR managers, content editors and administrators can take advantage of the technology without expensive training programs or relying on IT developers.

Intelligence

What is most exciting for Brose is that FirstSpirit helps the HR team tailor content with each potential employee based on their capabilities and interests. The HR team can easily access information about new hires from the vast corporate database which greatly improves how they target new employees. The results? By using segmentation, testing and optimizing personalized outreach to prospective employees, Brose has seen a significant reduction in applicant bounces, raised the prospect-employee conversion rate, increased IT applicants by 100% and increased the length of time that employees remain with the company.

FirstSpirit is an integral part of our recruitment efforts and it has vastly improved the quality of our new hires. We have a small HR team with limited IT support which means we need technology that is easy to use, lets us personalize our content and simplifies how we target candidates across multiple channels. The hybrid CMS model has generated huge benefits for our company and we see the technology as a valuable tool to help us grow our company.

Tina S. Cornelius, Head of Personnel Services / Brose Group