Recruiting Travellers for Tech Roles

Joyce Goh, Program Manager | Tech Recruiting Lead, APAC Talent Acquisition, Expedia Group

Travel and tourism is one of the world’s largest economic sectors, supporting one in 10 jobs worldwide and generating 10.4% (US$8.8 trillion) of world GDP. And it’s growing. One in five new jobs were created by the industry over the last five years.

Travel companies require increasingly tech-savvy team members, and at Expedia Group, our team includes thousands of the world’s best and brightest data scientists and analysts. Competing for and retaining top tech talent requires out of the box thinking, and elevating “bleisure” (ie, adding leisure travel to a work trip) opportunities is a differentiator for our hiring approach at Expedia Group.

With 24,000 employees across 30 countries, many of us work in global teams and of course, many of us travel. We often add vacation days to a work trip so we can further explore work-related destinations. The opportunity to bleisure has seen our employees with wanderlust skipping over to the National Parks while visiting our headquarters in Seattle, indulging in gastronomical outings during an onboarding training in Bangkok, and visiting the Rose City of Petra while spending time in our Amman office. Elevating team storytelling helps evidence the passion our team has for travel and our employees become advocates for Expedia Group as a great place to work.

Incorporating bleisure in our talent brand message through employee stories has been an effective recruitment strategy on many levels. Not only does it speak to our global work culture, our employees are articulating the company’s overall purpose –to bring the world within reach. It appeals to our targeted talent pools, especially millennials, who tend to value experiences over things, and are strong consumers of travel. It is aligned in our organisational belief that travel is a force for good in connecting and growing understanding across cultures.

Speaking of travel, the Asia Pacific region is one of the fastest growing in the global travel market and this growth is facilitating momentum and increased competition in recruitment. Recruiting in this region requires a keen appreciation of cultural nuances and understanding the diversity in the talent pools spread across more than a dozen countries. This needs to translate into market-specific recruiting strategies, which mirrors one of our key strategic imperatives to be locally relevant on a global basis.

At Expedia Group, one of our guiding principles is to be data-driven and business judgement led and it starts with our recruiting. To support the design and delivery of locally relevant recruiting strategies, we rely on data point in market insights, candidate personas, and recruiting metrics. For example, mapping out our candidate personas(the characteristics, skills and motivations that make up the ideal hire) has been a valuable tool-kit in our talent attraction approach. Understanding our candidate personas have helped us to develop an overarching bleisure talent brand messaging, supported the region in creating locally relevant branding collaterals and supplemented our sourcing channels.

With many offices around the region and world, we believe our diverse, highly multi-cultural and inclusivity team is a competitive asset.

To drive our inclusion recruitment strategy, we have looked at a combination of hiring process, skills training, sourcing channels and leveraging technology. We have mandated gender balanced interview slates (candidates and interviewers) for senior roles and exceptions must be sought from leadership. In 2019, we designed and launched an in-house interview skills online training course to equip our hiring managers on behavioural based interviewing skills and addressing unconscious bias. We have participated in events that promote women in technology and incentivize employees with double referral awards for women candidates who are successfully referred into tech roles. With technology, we leverage an augmented writing tool to avoid gendered language and bias in our job descriptions. We also deploy the pre-employment assessment tools such as video interviewing and online technical screening to give the candidates a platform to demonstrate their skills and aptitude beyond the resume.

Looking back in the year where we have developed many talent acquisition products and took on new channels and technologies in recruiting, it has been rewarding to be recognized with industry accolades. We were thrilled to receive the Silver award for “Excellence in Recruitment” at the HR Excellence Awards Singapore, giving well-deserved kudos to the team who successfully delivered on a hiring ramp in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Across our global offices, we were delighted to win “Best Diversity & Inclusion Recruitment Strategy” at London's Firma awards, and be recognized as one of the"Best Places to Work in Tech" by Glassdoor and “Best Place to work for LGBTQ Equality” by the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index.

With 2020 fast approaching, we’re gearing up for more innovations in the way we attract and recruit, with a focus on candidate experience that uniquely exemplifies our passion for travel. And for those of us who have a work trip coming in the new year, we think it’s time to plan for the next bleisure journey!