A recruitment solution that provides insight and value for DSB

For Danes, DSB doesn’t need much introduction. Thousands of Danes travel by train daily on the Danish State Railways in order to get around domestically. Foreigners might also be familiar with DSB, if they have spent time in Denmark and travelled by public transportation.

DSB is a company that has a big significance for Denmark, and the company has a long history. Exactly for these reasons, we at Talentech are proud of our cooperation with DSB. We have interviewed Laila Madsen from DSB’s HR department regarding their needs, challenges, and solutions within human resources.

DSB’s challenges in a changeable labour market

The Danish labour market is constantly changing. What a potential new employee looks for when applying for jobs varies, but there are also various external and internal factors that influence the recruitment process.

One of DSB’s challenges is quotas of women versus men for the positions they fill. All job ads have to be posted publicly, and the goal is that there are 40 % women in leadership positions at DSB by the year 2030. Filling these positions with women can be a challenge, if there are a lot more male applicants for the jobs. That was the case for the job as train conductor (specifically for the railway system called the “S-bane”).

DSB has a big team of HR employees, and they are divided into teams. Laila is part of a team that supports the HR managers with filling open positions.

On the basis of the fact that DSB established an employer branding strategy based on EVP surveys, part of the strategy was that they needed to attract specific target groups for IT and daily operations, and the company wanted to focus on the candidate journey. DSB wanted to base their values and ratings on data. In this way, it became clear that DSB needed an increased focus on recruitment data and recruitment analysis in order to help them guide the recruitment efforts.

The solution was obvious for DSB

From assumptions to data-driven decisions
By having an integrated system for recruitment data and recruitment analysis, DSB gets insight into the more detailed aspects of the recruitment process, and they can start to make conclusions on the basis of data instead of basing 90% of their decisions on assumptions.

Laila points out the most important things to find out:

• Where do the applications come from (which media)?
• Where do the applicants see the job postings?
• How many of the people who see the job posting apply?
• How many are employed?
• How many are women, and how many are men?

The last question in the list above is particularly important to DSB, as it is crucial for equality, that they not only get a good number of applicants but also get a good distribution of men vs. women.

This and more are things that DSB can now work with in a target-oriented way via the data- and analysis-system from Talentech.

The result is better recruitment decisions

There are numerous options when it comes to posting job ads, and historically many people have looked at the number of views and how many have shown interest in a job. But according to Laila, those aren’t the most important things:

It is all about what converts, i.e. making an interested person actually apply for a job. And in order to achieve this goal, Laila needs more data, and it also needs to be more representative, so she can make good recruitment decisions.

One of the most crucial insights that Laila and her colleagues can now get is that they can see which media channels are the most effective for them to post job ads on. She can for example see whether it is Jobindex or maybe Facebook, that they need to post a specific kind of job on in order to get more applications from more qualified applicants.

She goes on to say that they increased the number of female applicants for a job as train conductor in the first round, and they went from 6 to 18 % with an impressive number of 847 applications. It was so many that they had to close the application process early. At a later time, they posted a similar job and got significantly fewer applications, and the percentage of female applicants was also lower. Going forward, DSB can, among other things, use the data- and analysis-system to find out what the differences were between the two rounds, so they can better target their job ads towards women, so more women will apply, hopefully.

An efficient collaboration between DSB and Talentech

Laila Madsen has been and continues to be really satisfied with the collaboration between DSB and Talentech. Laila has been comfortable in the process, as the team at Talentech have been great at informing her as soon as new developments arose that directly impacted the Talentech solutions that DSB has.