El Paso Corporation Energizes New Hire Productivity and Cuts Costs with Onboarding
El Paso Corporation owns North America’s largest interstate natural gas pipeline system—approximately 42,000 miles—transporting more than a quarter of the natural gas consumed in the country each day. The company provides natural gas and related energy products to businesses and consumers throughout the U.S.
It is among the top 10 independent natural gas producers in North America with a balanced oil production program throughout the United States, Brazil, and Egypt. Its drilling programs focus on growing reserves at reasonable development costs and growing production efficiently through active cost management.
Headquartered in Houston, Texas, El Paso Corporation doesn’t build power plants, but it fuels them with natural gas. If El Paso employees can’t do their jobs, power plants don’t run, cities don’t light up, hospitals close their doors, and homes go without heat.
A word from El Paso Corporation
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“With Taleo Onboarding, we now have access to accurate recruitment data and performance metrics measuring our effectiveness at bringing new talent onboard with Team EP.”- Valencia Amenson, Manager, Talent Management, El Paso Corporation
Today El Paso employs over 5,000 people, including 98 human resource professionals and recruiters. Because El Paso has hired as many as 80 people per month, the recruiting staff is faced with the challenge of making sure it not only identifies and hires the right caliber of employees each month, but that it also has a consistent onboarding process for all of these new hires.
In order to make sure it has the right employees in place supplied with the right tools to do their jobs, El Paso implemented Taleo Enterprise Recruiting for its online hiring solution in 2006.
First, the company leveraged Taleo to develop an online pre-registration and pre-screening process for job fairs. This enables El Paso recruiters to anticipate the volume of participants planning to attend the events. More importantly, they can pre-screen and pre-qualify candidates and share this information with prospective hiring managers.
This resulted in extending invitations to only the most qualified candidates pre-selected by hiring managers. Feedback from the candidates included being pleasantly surprised to see managers prepared and anticipating their attendance at the event. Management at El Paso Corporation noted the significant improvement in candidate quality and indicated that it was a good use of their time to participate.
At the other end of the employment process, El Paso is also using Taleo for posting and tracking opportunities for existing employees to gain on-thejob development training. Managers create job requisitions for rotational assignments of 6–12 weeks in length on a Taleo-powered internal portal. Employees can apply through the portal, which routes the application to the appropriate manager for consideration. El Paso Corporation used Taleo to build appropriate communications into the entire cycle to ensure the managers and employees remain aware of current opportunities and status of rotational projects. Finally, Taleo produces reports to help El Paso monitor and measure the effectiveness of the rotational program, utilization, and placement achievements.
In addition to improving its hiring and development process, El Paso Corporation recognized the need for its employees to be able to do their jobs in an efficient manner from day one. Yet, the company experienced several challenges in making sure all new hires had the tools and resources they needed to be productive faster. Multiple and inconsistent onboarding processes were used throughout the organization, resulting in the inability to easily track which essential paperwork had been received and who had received it. These forms include critical documents such as direct deposit forms, tax forms, and employee benefit forms. Because El Paso couldn’t easily track paperwork, this led to an incomplete onboarding process and also impacted new hire set-up, including delays in providing essentials like a phone, computer, software and login ID.
El Paso Corporation also wanted cost savings for new hire package shipping and material costs. The company has hired as many as 80 employees per month. So, on average the company spent more than $150 per month to produce and more than $800 per month to ship packets to its new hires. Annual costs associated with new hire materials added up to thousands of dollars.
El Paso Corporation needed a system that would help streamline and automate the onboarding process. It needed a system with flexibility in workflow creation to fit its internal process. It also needed a way to automate communications between all departments involved in the set-up of new hires.
Fully customized forms and correspondence that could be sent internally as well as to external candidates were also necessary features. A final component that El Paso Corporation wanted was the ability for new employees to complete new hire information online. El Paso found everything it was looking for in Taleo OnboardingTM, which it implemented in 2007.
Taleo Onboarding speeds up time to contribution for new employees by streamlining and automating the onboarding process, while reducing paperwork and improving policy and legal compliance. Taleo Onboarding bridges the gap between promise and productivity with tools such as the New Hire Portal, specialized correspondence, fully customizable forms, and automated workflow. It extends the automation of the talent management processes to new workers with seamless integration to the Taleo Enterprise Recruiting solution already in place at El Paso.
El Paso implemented Taleo Onboarding as an extension of their hiring process. Using Taleo, the onboarding process for new hires is now initiated by the recruiter when individuals accept the offer of employment. The new employees receive an email requesting that they complete their new hire paperwork by accessing the new hire portal. Once the forms—including direct deposit, W-4, and I-9— are completed online, they can be printed and returned either by email or fax. New hires also receive an email on their first day of work asking them to complete additional paperwork including timesheet and badge ID request forms. During their first week on the job, all new hires receive another email to make sure they are off to a good start in their new job. This email contains helpful hints and quick links to useful information.
“The hiring managers at El Paso Corporation like that with the new automated system everything is in one place and there is much less paper shuffling,” says LaToya Daily, Project Manager at El Paso Corporation.
Taleo Onboarding did not just improve the new hire experience, it also improved the experience for the internal employees responsible for onboarding the new hires. After a candidate accepts an offer, the system automatically notifies a Human Resources representative and the hiring manager. The hiring manager completes a form requesting login ID and computer equipment. The completion of this form automatically triggers a notification that is sent to Desktop Support and IT Procurement. Notification is also sent to Data Security for setup of network security. After all these steps of the new hire process have been completed, the recruiter is notified.
“Recruiters really appreciate the fact that with Taleo Onboarding they can now monitor the onboarding process effectively and report progress to upper management,” says Daily.
Since implementing Taleo Onboarding, El Paso Corporation has seen significant cost savings. By using the system to automate the new hire process and allowing new hires to complete their paperwork online, El Paso Corporation saves more than $13,000 per year on printing, packaging, and shipping costs.
El Paso has also experienced increased efficiencies in its onboarding process. Ninety percent of all new hires receive their new hire paperwork the same day they accept the offer of employment. Prior to implementing Taleo, it could take up to ten days for new hires to receive the very same paperwork. El Paso Corporation also improved internal efficiencies around new hire set-ups.
Taleo Onboarding notifies all appropriate departments to ensure phone, software, and other day-one essentials are delivered effectively and efficiently. Based on survey results from new hires, more than 80 percent have their office set-up with all the tools they need to be productive when they arrive on their first day. Previously, it could be as many as 14 days after their first day before they received their computer and login ID.
Because it is so critical for El Paso’s employees to comply with the upcoming E-Verify regulations, going forward El Paso also plans to rely on Taleo Onboarding’s built-in capabilities to meet this regulation fully, automatically, and cost-effectively.
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