Company Profile: 

Sberbank is one of Russia's largest banks and a leading global financial institution. Accounting for about a third of the total assets of the Russian banking sector, Sberbank is a key lender to the national economy and holds one of the largest shares in the deposits market. The majority shareholder of Sberbank is the Russian Federation, represented by the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation, which owns 50% plus 1 voting share in the authorized capital of Sberbank. The remaining 50% minus 1 voting share of the Bank's authorized capital is owned by Russian and international investors. The Bank has an extensive branch network in Russia: about 14 thousand service points. General license of the Bank of Russia for banking operations No. 1481, issued on August 11, 2015.

Project Summary

In 2014, Sber began its digital HR transformation based on the company's fundamental values: human-centricity, leadership and team spirit. Sber's HR unit automated key areas of work, implemented a number of advanced digital tools, tested the best global methodologies, and accumulated its own expertise.

By 2019, Sber had the digital groundwork in place. At the same time, though, its HR processes existed in several systems that had completely different interfaces, creating a disparate client experience and barriers to solving tasks (for example, it was not clear where to look for what functionality).

Sber set the goal to develop a world-class digital system that would meet the needs of managers, employees and HR specialists, as well as fully meet the criteria of customer-centricity: accessibility, seamlessness, speed, adaptability, versatility, and relevance.

At the same time, the product was to be user-friendly and convenient, acting as a helpful digital assistant for every employee, not just HR and senior management. As part of solving these tasks, Sber has developed the Pulse HR platform and migrated to it by October 2021.

Today, "Pulse" allows solving the full range of tasks faced by managers, employees and HR specialists in the area of HR services and talent management.

For executives, the platform became an aggregator of data on employee status and morale, workflows, hiring and training, performance dynamics, workforce planning, and career development. This data forms the basis of advanced AI analytics, implemented in the form of automated dashboards that show team status across 4,500+ metrics.

Sber executives get insights from Pulse. If artificial intelligence detects and recognizes an early signal of a possible problem, it alerts the manager through a push notification, an urgent task, or an email.

This allows managers to take proactive measures: prevent mass absences, retain key personnel, assign relevant trainings, schedule the required numbers of new positions, and much more.

Line employees get HR services in Pulse 24/7 from any device, including personal smartphones. These include finding coworker contacts, ordering references, scheduling vacations, managing work schedules, handling sick leaves, getting compensation information, training, corporate news, participating in team activities, and more.

For HR-specialists, Pulse is a universal tool that allows to effectively solve business tasks and create a comfortable environment for interaction for all participants in a particular HR-process.

Examples

A prime example of what Pulse helps with is the hiring process. Even at the stage of communication with a recruiter, a potential candidate gets their own personal account in "Pulse". 

In this account, the applicant sees the status of consideration of his candidacy, undergoes interviews, tests and evaluations, exchanges documents with the recruiter, and fills out security service questionnaires. All communication - regardless of the complexity of the hiring process and the number of approving parties - takes place in one window.

The process is just as convenient for the hiring manager, who sees the "Create Vacancy" button in Pulse, fills in the necessary fields in a few minutes, and delegates the search to the recruiter. The manager can see both external and internal candidates in one window, see the status of each position, quickly evaluate applicants, and find the right person for the team faster.

Recruiters and hiring managers see detailed hiring analytics in Pulse, set up funnels, and use AI features such as resume ranking, which after implementation has reduced the number of recruiter calls to candidates by half, saving them time.

Another example: until 2-3 years ago, Sber employees had several programs in which they were trained. Accordingly, employees had to always remember how to use them, and HR-specialists spent a lot of time collecting data and analyzing the effectiveness of training.

At the same time, there was a lack of awareness of all training opportunities in the company, and not all opportunities were available to everyone. With Pulse, Sber has globally democratized educational content. Employees gained access to 60,000+ items of training materials, including useful expert articles, research, books, courses, video lessons, podcasts, audio materials - a full range of educational tools, all the way up to comprehensive professional development and additional education courses.

At the same time, learning in "Pulse" is also native. The developers applied social media mechanics to help employees form the habit of learning something every day. So a smart Feed was developed that offers employees a personalized selection of materials every day, based on the employee's position, interests, previous likes and recommendations from colleagues.

Another platform tool is the virtual assistant. Sber analysts analyzed calls to the phone line and emails and came to the conclusion that employees often ask complicated questions that relate to the expertise of different departments.

For example, a question about payments should be answered by the accounting department, and a question about timesheets should be answered by the HR department. At the same time, the person who asks the question wants to know why the payout was that amount in a given month. That is, to get the answer you need to call both the accounting and human resources departments, and then do the math yourself. 

Pulse's virtual assistant solves such problems quickly and easily, and you can call him with the same questions as many times as you want and at any time of day - unlike a live employee, who only answers during working hours.

Project Impact

In 2021, the Pulse platform was implemented in the bank's divisions, as well as a number of subsidiaries, such as SberObrazovanie, SberUniversity, SberKorus, Modern Real Estate Funds, Pervaya Management Company and others.

The implementation of "Pulse" brought tangible financial and managerial results. Sber distinguishes 3 main groups of positive effects.

1. Resource saving due to digitalization and transition to paperless electronic document management system (EDMS)

According to SberCorus estimates (the Calculator tool), switching to e-CDO saves about 5.5 million rubles per every 1,000 employees by reducing expenses on paper, office equipment, cartridges, and courier and postal services.

And according to Pulse business consulting experts, the effect of Pulse implementation for a company with 3000+ employees can reach 41 million rubles due to the automation of routine processes, cost savings on application software, servers, paper, office equipment, logistics, etc.

2. Measurable increase in HR process efficiency

Thanks to the AI model for CV ranking, the recruiter needs to call twice as few applicants to find the "right" candidate and successfully close the position.

Thanks to the Candidate's Personal Profile in Pulse and automatic offer placement, Sber has reduced the average time for accepting an offer by 10%. This helps win in the competition for qualified candidates.

Since the beginning of 2021, Sber has saved 58,000 hours of HR staff time on document recognition by implementing an AI model. HR specialists, meanwhile, are solving more important business tasks and can pay more attention to employees' problems and delegate routine operations to Pulse.

Since the introduction of AI models to assess the risks of employee churn in 2020, Sber retains 10% more employees per year to help manage burnout.

After switching to personalized learning content recommendations (the smart Development Feed), the platform's CSI rose to a score of 4.9 out of 5. This is an internal rating of Pulse users on criteria such as speed, design, usefulness, and usability of the platform.

Thanks to Pulse's simple staffing services, 65% of Sberbank's staffing events take place on full autopilot, i.e. without the involvement of an HR specialist at all. 70,000+ inquiries per month are resolved by Pulse.

3. High HR flexibility – instant response to business challenges and needs here and now

- In the midst of the pandemic, in 1 week we adapted HR and payroll services to the periods of self-isolation in 2021.

- During the first week of turbulence (February-March 2022), we implemented a new field "Country you are going to" in the leave application. This allowed timely assistance to employees who found themselves in a difficult situation for geopolitical reasons.

We are piloting a new functionality that will allow new employees on their first day of work to easily find their workplace, get acquainted with their supervisor and buddy mentor, quickly gain access to corporate systems, and complete their first adaptation tasks.

As not only the first client of Pulse, but also its software developer, Sber observes how users evaluate the HR platform and improves the product based on employee feedback. Thanks to Sber's ongoing work with data on people's interactions with Pulse:

The platform's internal RTF score is now 4.9 out of 5,

49,000+ employees view the developmental content feed daily, and in principle, one in five users use the feed,

32% of users solve their HR and HR issues outside of work hours and get what they need in seconds.

In May 2022, Pulse entered the market as a mature and calibrated world-class market product. The platform has been awarded Russian and international HR and UX/UI awards: the Crystal Pyramid (2021 and 2022), the 2021 Red Dot Design Award, Best For Life Design Award 2021, Digital Leaders Award 2021, IF Design Award 2022, InterComm 2022, Stolypin Award 2022, HR IT Awards 2022, etc. Today, Sber is happy to offer the market a quality digital HR product that is already appreciated and loved by more than 300,000+ users from various companies.