Active Placement Drives A Shift from People Finding Jobs to “Jobs Finding People”

Lee Hecht Harrison’s Investments in People and Digital Innovation Continue to Reshape the Outplacement Industry.

Lee Hecht Harrison (LHH) announced that “Active Placement,” their reimagined approach to outplacement, is delivering on the promise of helping individuals in career transition land in better jobs, faster. Since announcing the launch in July 2017, LHH has helped over half a million people around world connect to new opportunities with Active Placement.

“As we reach this milestone of supporting 500,000 individuals with Active Placement, there are a number of key successes that demonstrate the value and impact Active Placement is bringing to every person we support,” said Greg Simpson, Senior Vice President and Career Transition Practice Leader at LHH. “Most exciting is a key measurement that comes directly from survey responses we receive from candidates after they’ve landed. Over 90% of candidates who experience Active Placement report that they landed in a similar or better job, with a similar or better salary. On top of that, our personalized career coaching and approach to job connections have resulted in 81% of candidates reporting that their new job reflects a better alignment with their career objectives.”

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While dedicated individual coaching and in-person support remain at the heart of the way LHH works with candidates, their investments in their own digital transformation along with their unique strategy for connecting people to jobs have dramatically enhanced the human support they provide.

“We’re using artificial intelligence and data at scale to inform the way we coach and develop candidates and connect them to opportunities, creating an advanced, personalized user experience that drives individual success. At the same time, we’re helping Talent Acquisition teams and hiring managers to fill open positions with highly skilled candidates as they exit leading organizations. It’s a strategy that results in ‘jobs finding people.'”

At the center of this job connection strategy is the Digital Talent Exchange, LHH’s proprietary system that brings together the universe of LHH candidates with exclusive job openings from employers actively seeking talent. As part of LHH’s enhanced personal branding support—which also includes an SEO optimized resume and LinkedIn profile—each candidate receives a personal profile in the Digital Talent Exchange, making them visible to thousands of hiring managers and recruiters with existing and emerging talent needs.

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“Over the last six months, we’ve taken the Digital Talent Exchange to the next level,” said Simpson, “enabling candidates and Talent Acquisition to connect in a way that’s never been seen before.”

The Digital Talent Exchange now generates thousands of candidate-to-job matches each day. LHH’s Talent Promoters then add the critical human touch, refining these matches based on their first-hand knowledge of each company’s talent needs. They then send “Curated Talent Pools” to talent acquisition teams in the form of an interactive dashboard. Hiring managers can open individual profiles they’re interested in and directly contact candidates to arrange interviews.

“The feedback from talent acquisition and candidates has been so positive, and the results so strong,” said Simpson, “that we are now scaling this process to deliver 25,000 candidate profiles to hiring managers every month.”

Another critical component in the success of Active Placement is Ella, LHH’s artificial intelligence-powered Digital Career Agent. Launched globally in February 2017, LHH is celebrating Ella’s second birthday. Ella’s first role with LHH was to interact with candidates and learn about their search preferences to deliver a daily package of highly matched job leads, refining her matches as candidates indicated their interest level in each job. Ella has delivered nearly 100 million job matches to candidates.

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LHH has continued to build on Ella’s AI capability, and she is now an integrated part of each candidate’s digital experience, augmenting the relationship individuals have with their LHH Career Coach. By interacting with candidates throughout their LHH programs and recommending relevant content and resources, Ella has increased digital engagement among candidates by 50%. Candidates who interact with Ella are also 30% more likely to provide information about the new jobs they land, enhancing LHH’s already robust global capabilities for delivering meaningful data and analytics to their clients.

Yet another way LHH is advancing the use of data and machine learning to drive better outcomes for candidates is through Fit4Next (patent pending), a predictive tool that delivers live data to Career Coaches on the progress of the individuals they’re supporting. Created by LHH’s data science team, Fit4Next is based on the study of how the frequency and combinations of high-impact career transition activities help individuals achieve their desired outcomes.

By looking at data at scale from millions of past candidates, Fit4Next can determine if an individual is on pace for a successful outcome. In between personal coaching sessions, LHH career coaches monitor candidate progress on their Fit4Next dashboard, enabling them to quickly intervene when they identify someone who might be off pace.

Simpson stated, “Fit4Next is an example of how we’re putting new digital tools into the hands of the most informed career coaches in the industry. Along with Ella and the Digital Talent Exchange, it’s part of our ongoing commitment to invest in the best people and the best technology to deliver innovation that makes a difference to our candidates and clients.”

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