Enterprise Rent-A-Car approached Monster Worldwide in 2007 to help in the decision-making process of where to locate a new customer contact center.  The company believed that through predictive analysis of Monster’s real-time labor market information it could find the city most suitable for its new center.  This led ultimately to the selection of the site (here referred to as “Market A”).

Enterprise
Enterprise Holdings, ranked No. 21 on Forbes Top 500 Private Companies, owns and operates more than 1 million cars and trucks, including the largest fleet of passenger vehicles in the world, under the Alamo Rent A Car, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and National Car Rental brands.  As North America’s largest car rental company, Enterprise Holdings operates a network of more than 8,000 car rental locations worldwide.  It leads the industry with more than a third of all airport business in the United States and Canada.
BusinessWeek ranked Enterprise as a “Best Place to Launch a Career” for four consecutive years. Enterprise believes almost exclusively in promoting from within—another attribute that has contributed to its excellent reputation among recent college graduates

Monster’s Analytical Framework
Monster has a global footprint that reaches over sixty countries and over 80 million people each month. In the United States, visitors to monster.com perform over 150 million job searches in a month and upload over 40,000 resumes per day. Enterprise had worked with Monster for many years as a recruiting partner, and had recently started working with Monster as a source of human capital analytics.

Monster has created a separate division, Monster Intelligence, to analyze information for customers. To assist Enterprise Monster proposed a multi-pronged analytical framework that included the following steps. 

1.  Determining the Business Need and the Capabilities Required

2.  A Short List of Possible Site Locations
To analyze options efficiently, it is recommended that an organization identify three to six locations that will then be analyzed in detail to make a site recommendation. This is best done with a mix of qualitative and quantitative factors. Quantitative factors that can be used to rank locations in order of priority include:

• Unemployment rate
• Payroll change
• Rate of economic growth
• Concentration of desired occupations in each market
• Typical annual salary of desired occupation

This type of location sorting should be used as a preliminary step to focus in on markets that might be of interest for the organization. A much deeper analysis of each market is needed to ascertain whether it represents an ideal recruitment area.  After three to six locations have been selected for consideration, the next step is to evaluate and compare the talent pool across the locations.

3. Evaluate and Compare
This is done in several ways.

• Calculate the talent density for each critical occupation. Talent density is the total number of people working in an occupation in a location, divided by the total workforce for that location, multiplied by 100. This is used to understand how difficult it would be to recruit talent in one location compared to another.
• Compare a national job search index to a local job search index for each occupation. The job search index is the total number of job searches by occupation and location, divided by the total for that location, multiplied by 100. It is a direct measure of job-seeking activity, an indicator of how likely a person with a particular occupation in a specific location is to apply for a job opening.
• Prepare a talent profile for each critical occupation. In the course of evaluating a local market, it is important to understand the profile of the people company might be recruiting. In some cases, Factors to profile include:  Mobility of talent, Full-time versus part-time workers, Career level, Education level, Pay demands.

4. The Demand for Talent
In the same way that it is important to evaluate the supply of talent, it is equally important to evaluation the demand for talent. The demand for talent represents the amount of competition your company will experience should it choose to enter the local market. Therefore, knowing the demand trend is critical to understanding how successful a major recruiting initiative will be in each market.

To do this:

•  Evaluate posting trends over time for each critical occupation
•  Calculate the talent demand index for each occupation. The talent demand Index is a calculation of the number of job postings over the total number in the occupation workforce, multiplied by 100. 
•  Consider supply versus demand. Look at the labor conditions for each of the markets by plotting the markets in a graph showing a simple talent-market plot. This will help you identify the relative competition for talent in each market.

5. The Economic Situation
It is helpful to summarize the economic conditions for each market as an aid in understanding the economic backdrop for each proposed site.

Include the following in each market summary:

• Unemployment and payroll trends
• Major industries and employers of the region
• Rate of economic growth or decline in the market
• Basic demographics of the workforce
• Economic incentives for companies to locate in the region
• Cost of facilities/office space in the market

 

6. The Competition

• Use job posting trends to identify your close competitors’ presence and recruitment activities in each location being considered
• Identify which industries hire the most for the occupations your company will need. Identify and profile top companies in each location being considered.

The Enterprise Analysis
Monster followed the analytical framework above to provide insights using current and historical data to support Enterprise’s decision on contact center location. The new contact center would need to handle more than 10,000 reservations and customer service calls per day. The services provided would include reservations assistance and customer support. Working together Enterprise and Monster identified the most critical occupations by level (entry-level, managers, directors) of customer service personnel.

As the next step, Enterprise selected a short list of four possible site locations. For purposes of the case study, we call them Markets A, B, C, and D. Although Enterprise had narrowed the locations under consideration internally, the Enterprise team requested that Monster take an external view and compare these locations to other markets across the United States to ensure that all possibilities were evaluated and that no favorable location was overlooked. At the time of the analysis, Monster analyzed millions of candidates who might fill Enterprise’s needs and the uncovered the following:

• There were more than 3.5 million customer-service resumes in the Monster database, with an average of over 99,000 new resumes being added each month. This equated to about 177 customer-service resumes for each job posting on Monster.
• On average, there were over 4.3 million customer-service job searches each month, and there were over 2 million job-search agents sent to candidates looking for similar jobs. Over 84 percent of these job-search agents were received daily via e-mail.

 Although Enterprise had identified four target locations, Monster provided information on other markets that had the most talent to support Enterprise’s hiring needs. Monster also evaluated growth metrics for over 200 locations, allowing for market-to-market comparisons.  In many cases, Monster evaluates additional talent-related metrics to assess a market for clients.  Some of these additional talent-related factors include:

• Desired salary.
• Flexibility in scheduling.

Monster assessed the demand for talent in each potential market. it ranked over 200 markets based on the number of resumes per job posting and conducted additional analyses of the top twenty locations for 2007 with the highest resumes per job posting within the area of customer service and call centers. A high number of resumes per job posting indicate an abundant labor supply, thus a surplus of interested candidates.

Although the four markets on Enterprise’s short list did not fall within the top twenty markets nationally, Market A was ranked in the top 25 percent of the over 200 markets in terms of resumes per posting. Overall job postings on Monster in Market A had grown 12 percent over the same period a year earlier. However, customer-service job postings in Market A grew at an even greater 27 percent over the same period the year before.

Monster also analyzed the current economic trends related to customer-service and call-center occupations that could impact hiring for these critical occupations. Below are some key takeaways from the analysis at a national level, as well as for the key markets that were under consideration:

• As an industry, dedicated call centers had experienced a dip in employment over the past ten years. The last recession (2000–2002) hastened the automation and offshoring of traditional call-center services by a large contingent of American companies.
• By the end of 2004, there were approximately 2.1 million customer-service representatives employed in the United States, which was 1.5 percent of the overall workforce.
• Projected employment growth between 2004 and 2014 for the customer-service occupation was 23 percent greater than the average of all occupations
• The state of Arizona had the highest concentration of customer-service representatives—2.7 percent of total state employment.
• Market D had the highest job growth, indicating a strong local economy where new job opportunities were being created at a rapid pace.
• Market A’s metropolitan area jobless rate had decreased to 4.7 percent in May 2007, down from 5.1 percent a year earlier. These numbers were considerably more favorable for recruiting compared to other markets under consideration.
• Market A was the weakest of the four markets short-listed by Enterprise in terms of job creation. Payroll in Market A grew 1.1 percent year over year in May 2007, which was slower than the U.S. rate as a whole.

Monster also looked at the competition for customer-service talent. It identified companies that had existing call centers or were in the process of opening up such facilities in the considered markets. For example, Market E and Market F (which were within fifty miles of Market D) had become home to over 200 new customer-service centers. The competition and cost for talent in these markets were much higher than in other markets. The favorable competitive situation in Market A, combined with many other factors, provided support for the recommendation that Enterprise select Market A as the location for its new customer contact center. 

 The Outcome

As a result of the thoughtful consideration of many factors, Enterprise selected Market A for its contact center. Enterprise chose that market for several reasons, including a strong labor supply relative to demand. Enterprise also found Market A to be a good site because of its proximity to a university, which provides a consistent source of educated and skilled employees who have flexible schedules and need part-time opportunities. “The workforce here is great," said a local contact center director, "We're so lucky to be in a city where we have access to a skilled, educated workforce.” 

Enterprise chose a downtown location because of its business friendly environment,  great building, and accessibility to public transportation. The contact center brings hundreds of people to work downtown, which means that more people are spending money in the downtown area and encouraging further development in the process.
As far as the recruitment strategy to staff this new branch, Enterprise focused on a workforce with a slightly different profile from its other call centers.  To supplement its primarily full-time team, Enterprise worked with the university to make opportunities available that were flexible and appealing to the students. Having access to an educated, flexible workforce allows Enterprise to maintain balanced coverage at the contact center without having to outsource—a practice that is typical in this industry.

The contact center began taking calls for Enterprise in April 2008. Employees at the new center now handle more than 10,000 reservations and customer service calls a day for Enterprise, National, and Alamo. The performance of the contact center has been outstanding, with high customer-resolution rates and high employee and customer satisfaction. The care and diligence that Enterprise exercised in analyzing all of the factors in selecting a site led to a successful site implementation and resulted in a desirable business outcome.

*****

Courtesy of Jesse Harriott, senior vice president and chief knowledge officer at Monster,  Jeffrey Quinn, senior director of Monster Intelligence and Marie Artim, assistant vice president-recruiting for Enterprise Holdings.