The Challenge
Travel + Leisure Co. is a global timeshare company headquartered in Orlando, Florida. It boasts a portfolio of nearly 20 resort, travel club, and lifestyle travel brands, and provides outstanding vacation experiences to millions of owners, members, and subscribers every year.
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced international border closures and lockdowns, the hospitality industry was one of the first and hardest hit. Travel + Leisure had to shut down resorts and close sales centers, and hard decisions were made to furlough staff and halt hiring.
The Focus
Travel + Leisure needed to keep its workforce (both current and former) informed and engaged.
“How do you communicate personalized messages at scale to different audiences across the globe on different continents in various languages?” says Bill Malcolm, Director of Talent Acquisition at Travel + Leisure. “The ‘one size fits all’ approach wasn’t going to work.”
It was also important for Travel + Leisure to consider its long term business strategy. Once lockdown restrictions ended and borders reopened, the team would need to rebuild the workforce quickly and cost effectively. To hire at speed, it was imperative to keep furloughed workers engaged, motivated and connected to their future with the organization.
Technology was pivotal to this engagement and communication strategy.
The Solution
Travel + Leisure chose Clinch to engage and communicate with its furloughed talent. Malcolm’s team already used Clinch for external candidate attraction and nurture, and selected the platform to engage its furloughed workforce based on its proven flexibility, capability and agility.
“Clinch is so easy to use, the purposeful partnership and full integration with our ATS made it easy to implement,” says Malcolm.
Using Clinch’s self-service career site functionality, the Travel + Leisure talent acquisition team created a microsite full of resources designed to support and stay connected with furloughed workers. It was appropriately named ‘Connections’, and was constantly updated with relevant content, news and job opportunities. Within weeks of mask mandates being introduced, photos of mask-wearing employees were featured across the career and Connections site.
Malcolm’s team were previously using SMS and email templates to recruit talent, and these were rebranded for internal communications. Automated workflows delivered targeted emails across different audience groups and languages, with employee status data seamlessly fed in from the existing Workday ATS.
Travel + Leisure sent 94,638 emails during its furlough engagement program. These were met with a 59% open rate and a 30% click through rate. ‘Heat map’ capability showed visitor interaction and engagement levels across the site, allowing the team to see what content resonated with furloughed employees.
“We never stopped our task of communicating with people,” says Malcolm.
When the time came to rebuild the workforce, Travel + Leisure re-engaged and re-discovered its past candidates. Moving candidates from the existing ATS into Clinch’s CRM allowed this passive talent pool to be automatically nurtured and re-engaged. This has now become Travel + Leisure’s number one source of hire with 1.4 million ‘warm’ nurture candidates to draw from.
Travel + Leisure continues to leverage Clinch’s capability and flexibility as it returns to full reopening of resorts and sales call centres.
Malcolm’s lessons learnt:
- Choose a recruitment marketing software partner that does not lose sight of client relationships.
- Know the full capabilities of the Clinch platform.
- Having multiple users always helps.
