GROWMARK, Inc. is an agribusiness cooperative and historically has naturally attracted candidates with agricultural education and experience. That’s a good thing—having that context in agriculture helps. However, as the company has grown so have the many roles in supporting business operations such as accounting, technology, human resources, and marketing. The need for skills in those areas is far greater and the agricultural context can be easily trained.
In order to attract that broader set of candidates, with expertise and education in specific functional areas, GROWMARK set out to transform the way it reaches candidates. That included providing more context around roles and functions for each job—emphasizing that a candidate didn’t necessarily need an agricultural background.
Providing mobile access and enhanced search functionality was also important to reach a more remote and technology-focused segment of the candidate population. To accomplish these goals, GROWMARK set out to implement SAP® SuccessFactors® Career Site Builder with the help of Rizing HCM (formerly 3D Results).
Enabling Post-Go-Live Success
GROWMARK had already implemented SAP SuccessFactors modules, including Recruiting Management. That enabled it to hit the ground running with Career Site Builder, as it already had many of the processes and data sources in place to feed the new recruiting website.
There was still important work to be done, however, to ensure project success. A strong partnership with Rizing HCM enabled our group to deliver GROWMARK an implementation plan that would ensure all their needs were met. Additionally, GROWMARK took it upon itself to ensure that its employees were ready to roll with the new career site by focusing on training.
“The training aspect for managing site content was an important focus for us,” says Anthony Morales, GROWMARK HR Technical Project Manager. “We took initiative with learning so that our recruiting team would be enabled post go-live by absorbing product knowledge from the Rizing HCM group.”
Integrating with Recruiting Management to ensure data transfer between the Career Site was seamless was also important, and both GROWMARK and Rizing HCM worked together to ensure that the challenge was met and integration was completed successfully.
“It was exciting to see everything Rizing HCM came prepared with, they did so much homework on our company,” says Allison Stephey, Recruiting Marketing Analyst at GROWMARK. “I was very impressed with the ideas they came prepared with and the pages they already had prepped, it made things easy for me going forward.” Allison Stephey
Cooperative Access to Recruiting
GROWMARK is a cooperative, meaning there isn’t one centralized group doing the recruiting, but instead many individual locations looking to add staff. That heightened the importance of role-based permissions among the various sites.
This was a key challenge to the project, as permissions were granted to not just a single recruiting group but a series of employees in 40 states. Much like the challenge of Recruiting Management integration, the open collaboration between GROWMARK and Rizing HCM helped overcome the Role Based Permission challenge and lead to a successful project.
End Result: User-Friendly Access, Data for the Future
With the implementation of Career Site Builder, GROWMARK is able to provide a seamless user-friendly experience to prospective candidates across all four of its brands—GROWMARK, FS, Seedway, and Manito Transit. The addition of a mobile app option has been a major tool in being able to access a new set of candidates across all backgrounds.
GROWMARK has only scratched the surface on the value of the Career Site Builder project. Going forward, with integration between Recruiting Management and its career sites, the company will be able to provide advanced analytics on recruiting activity.
Those better analytics on candidates, combined with a user-friendly interface, will allow GROWMARK to optimize its recruiting efforts and find the best candidates possible, whether they have a background in agriculture or not.