Manjuri Sinha leads the talent acquisition, branding and onboarding for OLX Group, a global force of online marketplaces operating 20 brands in around 30 countries. Recruitment Tech interviewed Sinha about the company’s recruitment strategy and the tech stack it relies upon.
‘A lot of people don’t know about us’
While all numbers indicate that OLX Group is a global powerhouse within the field of online marketplaces — Sinha says the company is still relatively unknown to most. “We are not in the markets that we don’t have a product in, and a lot of people don’t know about us”, she said. “In essence, we are trading platform where you can trade re-use goods or goods for use. That can be anything from your house to you can sell your house, your car or mobile phones.”
OLX’s reach is quite enormous. “We have 20 plus brands, 30 markets in the world. 10,000 plus people and 81 nationalities. Because we are enabling people to reuse items of products, we’re definitely helping the planet as well. But with the climate change and the carbon footprint that we all of us know that we need to be careful about.”
‘We operate between everything that is product, data and tech’
With an organisation of such magnitude, Sinha is in charge for an enormous variety of roles. “It ranges from everything for product data and technology. Then we have the retail segment, where we also have an offline population of retail associates, as well as finance and marketing jobs. You could say that we kind of operate between everything that is product, data and tech.”
“Talent acquisition needs to be responsible and accountable for the end-to-end process.”
Responsible for everything talent acquisition, Sinha’s work also covers employe branding and onboarding. “In some organisations, these are segregated. But in our organisation, we’ve put it all together because as I see it, the acquisition of talent starts with the first instance somebody thinks about your company, or changing jobs. Talent acquisition needs to be responsible and accountable for the end-to-end process. You can’t just drop the ball and say: OK, now it’s your problem.”
OLX Group has onboarding, candidate experience and data specialists working within the company. Everything is done to ensure the process is high touch when it needs to be, while automations help with volume recruitment. “If we have a VP or a director that needs to be recruited, you have personal contact, personal scheduling.”
Plenty of tools
The tech side of things is put together by a program manager, who takes care of the full tech landscape, Sinha says. “We of course have an applicant tracking system. We were using Greenhouse earlier, but have moved to Lever recently. Initially our ATS was only restricted to the population for product ID and tech hiring — but now it’s being used for all hiring.”
“We leverage GoodTime, which is a scheduling tool which has helped us tremendously”, Sinha continues. “It is an automated machine learning-based calendar matching system, where you literally need less manual support from the coordinators so they can support the candidates. And really look at experience rather than just sitting and looking for time on calendars and rescheduling interviews.”
“All these tools that I’m talking about are also integrated with each other. So these systems then speak to each other.”
OLX Group also uses tools for augmented writing to help with job descriptions for inclusivity, DataPeople, and tools that further enhance the company’s strategy on automation in onboarding areas, such as ServiceNow. Moreover, the company used TalentHub to enhance candidate experience. “And all these tools that I’m talking about are also integrated with each other. So these systems then speak to each other.”
The tech has to talk to each other
Whereas some companies run after any form of recruitment technology without any sense of strategy, OLX Group prides itself on tech as part of its hiring process. Minha sees two key elements in choosing which technology can help. “If you still do ad hoc processes and if you don’t keep KPI’s — then no kind of tooling will help you. What do you need at what time? What are the problems that you’re solving? It’s very important to know an answer to that question. And then, with the tech, it’s important not to just have 16 different tools and nothing talks to each other.”
Doubling down on internal talent in 2023
For 2023, Minha sees reasons to be prudent moving forward. “We’ve heard change or die a number of times in the past months. For us, I think it’s important that we double down on internal talent. A lot of organisations, probably including ourselves, haven’t done that well enough. That’s what we’ve started doing with a new internal marketplace — not just within our organisation, but also within our parent company and the portfolio companies. So people have access to jobs in all of our different companies that they can apply for.”
“Rather than looking at a lot of external hiring, which is huge cost as well, I think it’s important we look internally.”
The other primary focus will be upskilling. “20% of your time you can probably dedicate to something else in order to upskill yourself. Rather than looking at a lot of external hiring, which is huge cost as well, I think it’s important we look internally. What can I upskill for the for the for the organisation and what can I do to ensure people upskill properly? That’s where the train to hire models come in. A lot of organisations like Google and Accenture have been doing this for a long time. So we are eyeing something similar.”
