Travelocity Builds Recruitment Travel Tool For Lockheed
Lockheed Martin has brought its previously offline-based domestic recruiting travel services onto an automated Travelocity Business platform, eliminating the manual creation of profiles, reducing agency service fees, and automating the approval process and the building of shell travel profiles.
The system is being used in two of the company's five regional recruiting centers, with another one to be deployed this quarter. When fully deployed to its five recruiting centers, Lockheed projects an annual transaction fee savings of $150,000. Thus far, the automated process has an average savings of $45 to $65 per recruit ticket for the Bethesda, Md.-based company.
Lockheed, Travelocity Business' largest client, has been instrumental in shaping some of the travel management company's technology developments and the recruitment travel sub-site already is being used by a small number of other Travelocity Business clients.
In August of 2007, the Orlando recruiting office began testing following months of development between Lockheed's human resources, IT and travel departments with Travelocity Business. In Orlando, 72 percent of all applicants booked travel online, amounting to agency service fee savings of 53 percent, according to Lockheed director of global travel services Richard Wooten. In addition, the recruiting travel volume more easily has captured recruitment travel volume for reporting and supplier negotiations.
The Travelocity Business tool enables Lockheed administrators to create profiles of potential recruits online and provide them with customized reservation options, while giving access to Lockheed negotiated rates and preferred suppliers. Each recruiting center has its own customized online recruitment system, which enables human resources to present potential recruits with the appropriate local hotels and class of service available to them. Once the trip is completed, the shell travel profile is discarded. If hired, the data is retrievable through the HR database, which provides weekly feeds to Travelocity. "We were able to take out a lot of the concerns associated with giving somebody who is coming in for a one-time interview access to our booking system and discounts," Wooten said.
Previously, dedicated Travelocity agents handled recruitment travel in connection with Lockheed human resources administrators, which created a slower workflow and multiple reservation changes. "We were touching those reservations quite a bit," said Travelocity Business president Lesley Harris. "There was a lot of back and forth."
Before deployment, Wooten received "hard pushback" from the recruiting centers, despite their previous process, which included manual creation of recruit travel profiles and manual approval following the booking.
"They felt we were going to force them to do extra work, while they are just trying to bring people in the door and they don't have the time to handle all these administrative tasks," according to Wooten.
While surface savings, such as time and cost are being delivered, Wooten said the automation provides a starting point for new hires to understand Lockheed's travel program, which is widely online-based with a 91 percent online booking adoption for its $253.8 million 2007 U.S. booked air volume. "We capture their hearts and minds as they are coming in," Wooten said. "It gets them started right and now when they come in as a new employee, they are acquainted with the tool and it makes my job easier."