Engaging Tech Talent in a Tough Market for Renovate America

Software Start-Up Renovate America Partners with Cielo to Support Rapid Growth with Sustainable Processes

Renovate America is an innovative software and financing organization helping homeowners and small businesses invest in clean-energy projects. As the country’s largest provider of Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing, their proprietary tech-enabled market platform empowers communities to modernize and boost the efficiency of their homes.

Market Opportunity
With the growing trend toward green building, increased consumer adoption and government-supported clean-energy initiatives, Renovate America had massive market opportunity in front of them. However, it needed top tech talent in order to capitalize. As a technology start-up, it was not just about engaging and winning talent over California’s innovative tech giants – they needed to build the HR and Talent Acquisition framework to support their ever-growing organization.

Solution
To ramp up the hiring of hard-to-find tech talent while building the overall HR function and talent acquisition process, Cielo and Renovate America designed an end-to-end RPO solution, from sourcing through to offer-accept, for their business-critical positions, including technology roles such as Software Engineers, Product Management and Quality Engineers. With both on-site leadership and remote resources, the team maximizes SkyRecruit, Cielo’s exclusive technology platform, to engage critical tech talent.

Faced with the unique opportunity to build a function from the ground up, Renovate America and Cielo:

• Purchased, implemented and optimized an ATS and CRM system
• Underwent workforce planning and overall process design
• Created a sophisticated dashboard for reporting and gaining executive buy-in
• Drove alignment with Hiring Managers in crucial areas of the business
• Decreased overall Time to Fill for all critical roles

Driving Business Alignment
Oftentimes an RPO is seen as an order-taking job-filler, but with Cielo and Renovate America, the partnership goes well beyond that. Driving alignment between talent acquisition and the business has been key to the success. Cielo creates open lines of communication with business unit leaders to advise and educate, working to understand their changing needs in order to build a strategy that allows for continuous improvement without slowing down the hiring process. Cielo also offers on-site support, where face-to-face interaction – especially with the Tech & Product business unit – is critical for alignment and elevating the credibility of the overall talent acquisition strategy. True to their promise, Cielo lives their WE BECOME YOU™ brand philosophy, and embeds the talent acquisition team into Renovate America’s HR function to create one holistic function all working to drive the organization forward.

Innovating for a Culture Fit
With any successful, fast-growing organization, culture fit can be lost in the push for filling roles quickly. But at Renovate America, their culture and vision for a more energy-efficient future is at the heart of everything they do. Together, Cielo and Renovate America built CAP, or the Culture Ambassador Program, for Renovate’s employees to keep culture top of mind throughout the entire recruitment process, starting with the job scope call to language in job descriptions all the way through the interview process.

CAP is a network of employees from across the business charged as safeguards for Renovate America’s culture. These Ambassadors partner with the hiring manager during the interview process to ask questions that highlight key cultural success factors. Since launching, the CAP program has successfully screened 100% of candidates coming into the organization and provided the coaching and consultation needed for hiring managers to temper the drive for talent now with the importance of culture fit first. In an agile organization where every individual hire makes an impact on the business and culture, the CAP program has permanently hardwired culture into the talent acquisition process.

Delivering Impact
Renovate America continues to grow at a rapid pace while protecting their culture and avoiding the typical growing pains many organizations face. The partnership with Cielo delivered the following results:

• $5 million reduction in agency spend during the first year of partnership
• 50% increase in recruiter-sourced passive candidates in 2016, up to from 13% in 2015
• 26.4 day average time to fill, including highly niche technical roles, well below the industry average of 52 days (Bersin by Deloitte)
• 100% of Renovate America’s candidates willing to recommend the hiring experience based on their high-touch candidate experience
• 80% Hiring Manager Satisfaction, held consistent throughout training and change management