On-demanding interviewing evaluates more candidates, increases ROI

Client

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is a leading biotechnology company that invents life-transforming medicines for people with serious diseases. Consistently ranked as a top workplace and an innovator in the fast-growing biotech industry, the company’s intern program is a major source of hires for the organization.

Problem

Regeneron has no shortage of applicants, especially those majoring in STEM and life sciences. However, the existing hiring process couldn’t keep up with the demand for experiential student talent.

“Our process was to review all resumes, select those with our search criteria, and talk to everyone first hand – all first-round interviews were by phone,” said Natalie Griffith, Senior Manager of University Relations at Regeneron. “We were very bottlenecked at this step and we knew that we needed to find an alternate solution to better evaluate larger numbers of students, quicker.”

To be able to grow the intern program significantly and to also evaluate culture fit and skills, the team explored ways to modernize its hiring process with technology. “We talked a lot about how we spent our time, and where we needed to change our interviewing technique,” said Griffith.

Solution

Regeneron replaced its initial phone interviews with on-demand video interviews. “Part of our process remained the same. We post and review applications as before, but now we send a link inviting qualified students to complete an on-demand video interview. We don’t spend hours scheduling interviews and phone screening candidates who are qualified on paper but aren’t a fit for our jobs. And we’re able to evaluate quicker – sometimes you know within minutes of starting the video review that the candidate is either a great fit or they aren’t. Eliminating phone interviews for our first round interviews has saved us valuable manhours we’re now using to engage with the right candidates through live video interviews,” said Griffith.

“Using Modern Hire (now part of HireVue) has enabled us to increase the number of candidates evaluated for our roles so that we’re making better hiring decisions for our early, experiential and entry talent programs. And it also gives us more opportunity to evaluate culture fit as well as technical skills earlier in our evaluation process,” said Griffith.

Getting buy-in from hiring mentors was essential. “All of our positions are targeted. Every student has a project or set of responsibilities that is designed by the hiring mentor,” Griffith explained. “And they own their own project work, start to finish. Therefore, we have to fill each of our student positions through individual recruiting activities and efforts. We are creative in our approaches and our cutting-edge approach to our research so introducing new technology in our Talent Acquisition and University Relations makes sense.”

“Hiring mentors had initial concerns about losing the human touch, but feedback from them has been amazing,” she noted. “They love watching the videos – they feel like they’ve been introduced to the student and they can sense culture fit. They’re engaging with the students that they want to engage with for their final round interview. And many of those are completed using Modern Hire’s (now part of HireVue) live video interviewing.”

Results

Regeneron is seeing ROI. The company has increased the intern program and has added several new student programs targeting high school students and graduating university talent, all evaluated using video interviewing technology. “With video interviewing capabilities, we’re able to reach more campus talent and hire the best of the best no matter where they’re from,” explained Griffith.

“We’re now able to interview thousands and hire hundreds of students in the same timing it used to take us to hire 80 to 100. My team is the exact same size as it was four years ago. We would never have been able to hire this many people in this time frame without interviewing technology.” – Natalie Griffith