CEBU Pacific takes HR processes to new heights with Darwinbox
In the new post-pandemic business reality where a talent-driven market is forcing employers to reimagine employee benefits, flexibility, and workplace culture, HR leaders have gained a unique role in driving business results through agile people management. Established industry leaders and startups alike are undertaking extensive HR transformation projects with a renewed focus on creating positive employee engagement and experience. CEBU Pacific, a well-known airline company in the Philippines, has been on a similar journey of accelerated HR digitalization and modernization for the past few years, resulting in valuable lessons and impressive results.
Established in 1996, CEBU Pacific is a leading low-cost airline with a vast network of flights across the world. Part of the larger conglomerate Gokongwei Group, the company has built a significant fleet of aeroplanes and carriers over the past three decades. With more than 3,900 employees, creating an engaging experience at each stage of the employee lifecycle has been a top priority for the organisation, and this goal has only gained more prominence in the last few years. To build a coveted employer brand that attracts top talent and engages employees effectively, CEBU Pacific embarked on a transformation journey over two years back by partnering with Darwinbox.
In this article, we will take a look at the unique and exciting journey that CEBU Pacific undertook to modernise internal HR operations, discuss how Darwinbox HRMS helped the organisation realise its vision, and review the successes of this collaboration.
The need for an integrated and efficient HR platform and applying CEBU Pacific’s values seamlessly
CEBU Pacific recognised that operating in an industry with higher-than-average attrition levels meant a consistent focus on employee experience and people practices was imperative. To remain competitive in an unpredictable talent market, the company envisioned redesigning its core HR processes with a digital-first focus. This process of digitising and modernising a disjointed HR function wasn’t going to be easy, with nearly 4,000 employees spread across several locations. To envision and implement this massive undertaking, the organisation partnered with Darwinbox, an HR platform known for its high configurability and intuitiveness.
One of the biggest goals for Darwinbox when they came on board as partners was to instil the organisational values of agility, equality, and customer-centricity in core HR processes. Felix Dan Lopez, CHRO, CEBU Pacific, explained, “We envisioned building a brand that helps candidates and employees perceive our organisation as a top employer and workplace. We wanted to apply our commitment to ‘making moments matter’ with our customers, clients, and partners to our workplace culture.” Thus, to make the HR function more efficient, there was a need to view HR as the end-user and applications and employees as the customers.
With the task cut out, Darwinbox focused on two critical aspects of the employer branding framework and set out to achieve the following objectives:
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Create an end-to-end automated, efficient, and data-driven recruitment process
Integrate the siloed processes of job posting, sourcing, interviewing, shortlisting, job offer extension, and onboarding into a single platform that covers all aspects of hiring. This would address the existing pain point of having disparate piecemeal steps that prevented free-flow communication and hampered efficiency. The goal was also to digitise and automate many vital administrative parts of the recruitment process that mainly took place manually and offline.
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Implement a performance management system that indexes growth
Redesign and redevelop the prevalent performance management model to make it more values-driven with a greater focus on personalised career development planning. Supporting the implementation with comprehensive change management and technical support, Darwinbox aimed to ensure higher adoption and sustained usage of the new platform by keeping simplicity at its core.
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Unlocking HR’s potential as a growth-oriented business function
The new systems were implemented across CEBU Pacific in 2021, right in the middle of ongoing disruptions and challenges. Over the past two years, through this collaboration, CEBU Pacific has achieved the following milestones:
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100% adoption rate of the performance management system
The new growth-centric performance management system has achieved 100% adoption. With crucial organisational values, core skill competencies, and role KPIs woven seamlessly into the overall performance appraisal model, Darwinbox has helped CEBU Pacific’s vision of smart performance and career management through a profound system reconfiguration.
The advanced performance management system had a more robust appraisal framework and clearly defined employee career tracks with customised online individual development planning (IDP). Supporting tools for feedback and check-ins have helped create a culture of regular feedback loops and agile decision-making at all levels in CEBU Pacific.
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Enhanced candidate satisfaction score
Implementing an end-to-end recruitment platform for elevated candidate experience has significantly simplified and automated the airline’s recruitment process. Darwinbox housed a previously disjointed and offline process in a single system with consolidated, systematic, and organised workflows.
The usage of standardised templates available on Darwinbox has made it possible to automate all stakeholder communication and digitalize recruitment administrative tasks (such as scheduling interviews, collecting documents, and sending employment offer letters). Navigating Darwinbox’s intuitive user interfaces, receiving timely communication, and using self-service features have steadily increased the average candidate satisfaction score, which currently stands at 4.7/5.
Recognition as the ‘Best Employer Brand’
On the back of tremendous gains in streamlining and digitising HR processes, CEBU Pacific won the ‘Best Employer Brand’ in the 2022 LinkedIn Talent Awards. These annual awards acknowledge companies and people across the globe who have excelled at engaging with talent, creating inclusive workplaces, encouraging learning and development, focusing on employee retention, and building strong employer brands. A win in this category reaffirmed that the decision to partner with Darwinbox has been highly beneficial in making a positive candidate experience.
Lopez shared, “Winning the Best Employer Brand award would not have been possible without an agile candidate platform that uses adaptive technology and applies a user-centric strategy in the talent management process. Having Darwinbox as our Applicant Tracking System surely leaves a positive experience for our candidates.”
After achieving excellent results over the past two years, CEBU Pacific continues leveraging Darwinbox to progress on their innovation journey. In the next phase, these HR systems will be linked to the company’s application, CEBPlus. There are also plans to implement coaching tools and batch onboarding features in the near future.
An organisation as innovative and future-driven as CEBU Pacific needs an equally experienced HR-tech partner to create successful experiences for the company’s HR, applicants, and employees. Felix summed up, “Making moments happen is a marathon, not a sprint. We are delighted to be in partnership with Darwinbox on this journey to design best-in-class digital transformations and employee experiences.”