SmartLynx Airlines cuts recruitment times

SmartLynx Airlines is an ACMI airline based in Latvia, operating flights across Europe, Africa and Asia. In 2022 SmartLynx Airlines will celebrate its 30th anniversary.

The main focus for SmartLynx is other airlines who don’t have enough aircraft capacity. Aircraft are leased to major airlines, together with the cabin crews, pilots, and the mechanics – particularly during the summer season when demand is high.

SmartLynx saw COVID as an opportunity to adapt and come out of the pandemic stronger. While other companies were cutting and pausing, SmartLynx stayed focused on growth.

Growth Mode

SmartLynx started adding additional aircraft to the fleet and recruiting people because they wanted to be ahead of the market when the pandemic began to fade away. Now they are larger and stronger than they’ve ever been – and they don’t plan on stopping.

“With so many roles open as we scale, we realised we need some help. We asked ourselves, how can we deliver this level of recruitment with the resources that we have – and that’s where HireVue came in.”

Mara Steinberga,

Chief of People & Culture, SmartLynx Airlines

COVID opened new areas of business for SmartLynx. They started cargo flights due to the global demand for medical supplies. The cargo operation is poised to be a major area of the business in the coming years. This requires a recruitment process that can flex and scale with market demands.

HR Transformation

The HR department at SmartLynx has 4 talent acquisition specialists and 13 in wider HR. Before HireVue, they would use phone screens to ask questions and then immediately move into online meetings.

“Hiring was really time consuming. I often had to get involved with non-stop interviews from nine o’clock in the morning until six in the evening. It takes so much time and normally you can sense from the first two minutes if the candidate is a good fit. We realised that we really needed to find a more efficient way. HireVue immediately saved us 2 – 4 hours per recruiter per day, we now have free time to focus on daily activities and internal cultural development plans. We have the flexibility to hire at our own pace and in our own time. This is great for the hiring managers because the more people you have to involve in the recruitment process the harder it is to organise.”

Mara Steinberga,

Chief of People & Culture, SmartLynx Airlines

SmartLynx are now able to review CVs and immediately send HireVue interviews to the candidates. The hiring managers then review them and decide if they want to progress the candidate to a live interview. Only then is time invested into psychometric or cognitive testing.

The initial stages, which previously took up to 6 weeks due to having to organise multiple online calls, have now been compressed into one week. Candidates complete their videos on average in 3 days, with recruiters taking an average of 1.5 days to evaluate them. Within just a few weeks of going live with HireVue, SmartLynx has been able to expand their candidate reach and receive applications from 66 different countries. A CSAT score of 88.4% shows that candidates are responding positively to the new process and technology.

Even Greater Heights

“Next, we’re interested in adopting HireVue’s game based assessments. I believe that this is something that we need for sure, in aviation there’s a specific skill set to actually succeed in this business because aviation is not for everybody – and we know it. We want the potential candidates to understand it too, and with these kinds of assessments we can identify if a person is the right fit for us – and us for them too which is equally important.”

Mara Steinberga,

Chief of People & Culture, SmartLynx Airlines