Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

Eaton Corporation is a household name here in Cleveland, ranking alongside brands like Sherwin- Williams, American Greetings, and KeyCorp. This diversified power management company with sales of $13 billion last year is also Cleveland’s largest Fortune 500 Company.

They’ve been here since 1914. And Cleveland just lost them.

Wednesday it was announced that Eaton will be taking their 460 corporate employees to a development in Beachwood, Ohio. Tom Breckenridge, reporter for the Plain Dealer, said “the looming loss of its largest company would be corporate deja vu — and another psychological downer — for this struggling city.” 

I spoke with Eaton’s recruiting team recently to talk about their new move, global recruitment initiatives, and how they, alongside their international teams, help keep 81,000 employees in 170 countries happy.

Please give me some background on yourselves and your positions.
Stephen Karagiozis- Talent Acquisition Manager: US Group. 
Mark Freeman- Sr. Talent Acquisition Consultant IT. 
Sean-Paul Veilleux- Talent Sourcing Team Lead.

Tell me about your recruiting team – what positions do you source for and how many people are on your team?

Stephen: Eaton Corporation has a centralized Talent Acquisition Center here in the US. Each Regional Talent Acquisition Manager leads a team of Talent Acquisition Consultants whose numbers vary. We have functioned in the US since 2000, and we have had a presence in Europe and APAC since 2004, and we have been in Latin America since 2006. 

I have a team of 8 Talent Acquisition Consultants who support the 5 business groups. My focus and my team’s focus is on all engineering/operations and sales and marketing positions for the Electrical/Fluid Power/Aerospace/Truck and Automotive groups.  We work on all professional level roles here in the United States and Canada.

In the past 2 years we have grown from a team of 25 globally to a team of 53. Our team consists of Talent Acquisition Consultants, Executive Talent Acquisition Consultants and Sourcers. Globally, we focus on professional exempt-level positions while utilizing and sharing global best practices.  

I just heard the announcement of your move to Beachwood.

We are pretty excited about the move to a new state-of-the-art building. It should be exciting.

What program are you most proud of that your team has developed?

For the past year and a half all of our efforts have surrounded employment marketing. Eaton as an organization has undergone a true re-branding, specifically with the unveiling of our new brand signature: Powering Business Worldwide. 

We have implemented video job postings on many of our positions, we have revamped the looks of eatonjobs.com, we are reducing the number of clicks it takes to apply for our positions, making it easier for the candidates to apply regardless of where they see our positions, and internally we are re-marketing the function and services that the Talent Acquisition Center provides to both our employees and our hiring managers. 

Are you using any Web 2.0 technologies to recruit? 

Absolutely. In this past year we have been very aggressive in regards to our Web 2.0 strategies. We have participated in numerous on-line career fairs like Wall Street Journal, and we are looking to continue to increase our involvement in these events. We also recently signed on with Jobs2Web for SEO.

We are running pay-per-click campaigns on our job site aggregator. We leverage social networking sites like LinkedIn so people are aware of our opportunities and we have purchased licenses to LinkedIn Recruiter. 

How are you recruiting Gen Y? 

We have a University Relations team here at Eaton Corporation who primarily focuses on both campus recruiting and Leadership Development Programs.  The Campus Managers partner with the business divisions to help identify specific needs that they have for both graduate and undergraduate candidates.

We also have Leadership Development Programs where participants have the opportunity to work in our different business on a rotational basis. In the future however this is source of talent that the Talent Acquisition Center needs to learn how to attract. 

Do you utilize job boards? Do you think they are still important in the recruiting space, or are they dying out?

Yes, we still utilize job boards. Like most Fortune 500 organizations we post all of our positions on various sites like Monster, CareerBuilder, diversity sites, etc. These job boards provide us with qualified active candidates while helping our company brand ourselves in the marketplace. Job boards, however, will eventually phase out of most companies’ strategic plans. 

Right now it is too risky to not utilize them and most organizations are not ready to lose this resource.  Large job boards will have to change their model to attract new candidates or they will not provide the ROI that companies require. 

Job boards are just one piece of what we do in order to identify qualified candidates. We use resume search aggregators that enable our recruiters to search multiple job boards at one time. We utilize targeted email blasts for many of our functional and engineering roles. 

We utilize sites such as LinkedIn, Jigsaw, and ZoomInfo to identify candidates from specific industries. We use job board aggregators such as Indeed and SimplyHired as well. We also have an in-house sourcing group that is responsible for developing a talent pipeline for either current or future roles. 

Any new programs/initiatives your team is developing?

This past year we have implemented a Global Employee Referral Program that has enabled us to leverage our internal competitive intelligence. 

Another initiative that comes to mind is our continued involvement with diversity career fairs. The Talent Acquisition Center and University Relations department are working closely together to ensure that we are attending all the major career fairs.   

Popularity: 21% [?]