As one of Australia’s largest litigation law firms, Shine Lawyers needs an ATS and CRM that can empower its recruitment team to move quickly and efficiently. 

We recently sat down with Michelle Kelly, Talent Acquisition Lead at Shine Lawyers, to discuss how their recruitment process has transformed with JobAdder, leading to huge improvements in time to fill, team capacity and candidate experience.

Manual processes were holding Shine Lawyers back

Prior to implementing JobAdder in 2020, there were a number of elements in the recruitment process which were labour-intensive and manual for the Shine Lawyers recruitment team. Michelle says it was time for a much-needed change. “We had another Applicant Tracking System, and there were lots of things that it just couldn’t do for us. And because I had used and implemented JobAdder previously, I knew that JobAdder could do those things.” 

“The first item that was holding us back was the amount of time it took us to manually schedule interviews. We did it all through Outlook, it was laborious, and it took time away from actually sourcing great candidates.  It involved writing in all the information required, manually attaching position descriptions and other documents, every time. We also didn’t have any ability to talent pool or skills code candidates. And in the legal industry, where good lawyers are very difficult to find, and they must have specific practice area expertise, this inability to talent pool or candidate search properly was holding us back, as well. They were really the key issues that we needed to resolve in our recruitment process.” 

JobAdder wins on key features

Michelle states that while the decision-making process was thorough, she knew that JobAdder was the right fit for her team. “We did actually look at several other systems, because our business was implementing an HRIS at the same time, and most HRIS options had a talent acquisition module, but most had a small proportion of the talent acquisition-specific features and benefits that we get out of JobAdder. I really did have my heart set on implementing JobAdder, after our research and once we were given the okay to take a “best in breed” approach.”

“With JobAdder, you have the ability to quickly submit candidates to leaders, the ability to quickly and easily schedule interviews in-system, and the ability to talent pool, so you can later find those candidates with really rare skillsets.” 

“With our old system, we would talk to candidates, and we wouldn’t be able to find them again for a role in the future unless we remembered their name, which resulted in significant candidate leakage. So, being able to search on skills was one of the key features we really needed. Another feature that heavily influenced the decision-making process was parsing of resumes. So, dropping the resume into JobAdder, and JobAdderparsing in all the data automatically, as opposed to having to do manual data entry of addresses and phone numbers, was another time saver for us. That was a key influencing factor in the final decision, and how JobAdder got over the line with leadership as well, because the HRIS TA module didn’t have that parsing ability, and reducing  manual handling was a key objective for us.”

Shine Lawyers sees significant growth with JobAdder’s support

After implementing JobAdder in May 2020, Shine Lawyers has seen big improvements in time to fill, team capacity, talent pooling, candidate screening and skills matching. Michelle states that time to fill has seen a substantial improvement. 

“Our time to fill improved massively when we implemented JobAdder. At one point in late 2020, we got it down to nine days on average for Shared Services roles, which for an in-house recruitment team was a huge achievement. We were really, really proud of that! It’s made our whole process faster. We can review candidates so quickly now. That’s one of the success stories I want to share. We effectively doubled our capacity for volume.”

“Our time to fill improved massively the day we implemented JobAdder.”

Michelle believes this boost to speed is due to the range of capabilities that JobAdder unlocks for her team. “No longer are we starting from scratch every time we have a role come through. Now, we have talent pools set up. We have candidate ratings. We have skills coding. We’re using all of those tools, and we’re finding great candidates, quickly. Our previous ATS didn’t have those features, and so we had to start afresh with each candidate, every time they applied. That’s how JobAdder has improved our time to fill massively. And it makes us happy to use it every day.”

“Across the Shine Justice group, the organisation had hundreds of jobs to fill over the last couple of years. I would say we’ve come close to an extra 50% efficiency in our team, recruiting for these roles.” 

Managing a range of recruitment needs

As an organisation that has volume recruitment needs, proactive perm lateral recruitment needs, and everything in between, Shine Lawyers has a diverse range of recruitment requirements. “We couldn’t go with a system that was only good for headhunting and finding a needle in a haystack, and we couldn’t go with a system that was only good for volume. We do both. We have a call centre here, and we’ll receive up to 800 applicants for our call centre roles. Whereas, for senior lawyer roles, we might receive zero applicants! So, we can’t rely on a system that lets us post and pray and manage lots of applicants and weeding them out. We also can’t just go with a system that lets us find needles in a haystack. It had to be both.”

The ability for JobAdder to empower her team to handle both volume recruitment and proactive recruitment was a huge plus for Michelle. Another component that proved crucial for Michelle’s team was JobAdder’s LinkedIn Recruiter System Connect (RSC).

“The LinkedIn RSC integration has been a huge benefit to our team. We do a lot of proactive sourcing, and being able to pull those candidates over to JobAdder easily is vital, instead of having half the conversations living in one system, and half the conversations living in another.” 

“We have a firm decision, JobAdder is our source of truth. So, as soon as we start having conversations with a candidate, that goes into JobAdder. That’s where the conversations happen.” 

“I’ve spent 18 years in recruitment, but I’m not a head-hunter by trade, I’m actually a volume recruiter by trade, and I love efficiency. For me personally, having to handle candidate conversations in multiple different applications was really frustrating, because it feels so inefficient. So to make proactive sourcing really efficient,  it has to be the most easy and straightforward way possible.”

That ease of use has been a game-changer for Michelle and her team, providing a seamless recruitment process that links all their tools together. “It’s been really beneficial to link out applications from LinkedIn to our JobAdder powered website. So, applications coming from all locations are captured in JobAdder, and if there are candidates that appear to have applied but haven’t made it in, well that’s really easy. We just import them from LinkedIn and we can contact them and say, “Hey, I saw you were looking at this job.” Even though that seems like a really small thing, it makes a big difference for us, keeping everything in one place. It also means the team can see the conversations their colleagues have been having with candidates they are looking at, again all in one place.”

“Being able to understand that someone in your team is already talking to that lawyer is really beneficial. I’m not managing my life out of multiple different systems and websites, I’m managing my life out of JobAdder.”

The Shine Lawyers team has also seen benefits when it comes to rolling out their new employer branding, and providing a consistent candidate experience. “What we’ve really loved doing, and what JobAdder has enabled, is really quickly and easily setting up templates for candidate contact. We released our Employee Value Proposition (EVP) last year, which had a variety of different collateral, including videos of our people talking honestly and authentically about what it feels like to work at Shine. We revamped all of our marketing collateral, and the language we use with candidates, and it was a simple half-hour job to go through all our JobAdder email templates, embed that language and add some great links to our Life at Shine website.” 

“Therefore, from a candidate perspective, they’re getting a consistent experience, whether they speak to me or anyone else in the team, because we’re all using the same language. It makes it really easy to communicate. We can make sure candidates have the right preparation and resources to be able to succeed in an interview with us, and that they understand what the benefits of working here are. That was something we could self-serve in JobAdder and set up ourselves, when we changed our language. Being able to quickly and easily set that up ourselves really had a positive impact on the candidate experience.” 

JobAdder provides value for money 

One of the key differentiators for Michelle when comparing recruitment software solutions was value for money. With JobAdder, she says she gets a superior experience across a range of features and a system that was clearly designed and built by recruiters, for recruiters.

“I’ve used quite a few different systems, and from a value for money perspective, particularly considering the size of the business that we are, we wouldn’t necessarily suit an all in-one-solution for all our HR needs. JobAdder is above average across so many features, as opposed to being really good at one thing and not so great at another. It ticks so many boxes, so you get bang for your buck. Across the end-to-end recruitment process, there’s no element or stage in the process where we have to compromise. With specialized features and functionalities that are not found in other solutions, JobAdder enables us to maximize our efficiency in streamlining our recruitment process.”

“The parsing of resumes seems like such a small thing, but so many Applicant Tracking Systems don’t do it. That just seems like a no-brainer to me, and JobAdder has been able to do it for over 10 years.”

“There are large enterprise-level systems that don’t have as many features in their Talent Acquisition module as JobAdder does. JobAdder is obviously designed and built by expert recruiters.”