A Connected, Collaborative Workforce Drives Innovation at Capital One

Innovation is a central part of Capital One’s DNA. This financial services leader has embraced digital transformation throughout its journey. From its humble beginnings as a startup to a top 10 U.S. bank, innovation has been critical to Capital One’s success.

Capital One strives to create new, innovative solutions that empower its customers to take control of their personal finances. The Zoom communications platform helps to power that work.

A technology-forward, people-centered organization, Capital One uses Zoom to provide premium employee and candidate experiences by:

• Connecting global teams and enabling efficient collaboration
• Enhancing inclusivity in the workplace
• Reimagining its talent programs through virtual recruiting

Embracing the future of work

Capital One makes it a priority to offer its employees the latest and greatest technology solutions. After Capital One pivoted to remote and hybrid work in response to global health challenges, the organization focused on using technology to further empower employees to collaborate and innovate in new ways. 

“Flexibility is key to how people and teams within the company work,” said Fred Love, Director of Unified Communications and Collaboration at Capital One. “We have teams that are co-located and teams that are geographically dispersed, so with that, we need solutions that support all those different work types. As we look at the future, and where we are going, it’s going to be key to make sure that everyone is at the table.”

To better serve its customers and create new solutions, Capital One is always searching for the right talent. However, hosting in-person recruiting events required a significant investment of time and effort. It also left very little time for potential candidates and the recruiting team to get to know each other. 

“You would assemble sizable teams, and you would plan these very large in-person events and trips to a variety of colleges and universities,” said John Keegan, Senior Director of Recruiting at Capital One. “And it’s a pretty restrictive time period in which students would interact with us and other employers.” 

“Tech candidates, because of the demand, are folks that have very limited time,” added Nikita Steals, Vice President of Tech Talent Acquisition at Capital One. “We need to be agile, we need to be able to move quickly and have the interface where they can build rapport and build that human element with ease.”

“At the start of 2020, we were contemplating starting to shift over just a portion of our recruiting events to virtual,” Keegan said. “When we started to introduce Zoom, what that allowed us to do is virtually be there and interact in many of the same ways that we would interact in person.”   

Empowering new ways of working 

When Capital One adopted Zoom as part of an enterprise-wide digital transformation, it took off among employees.

“Zoom was the easiest part of [our digital transformation] — it was the intuitive nature of the experience,” added Melanie Frank, Managing Vice President, Cyber Engineering, at Capital One. “People just picked it up, adopted it, and automatically saw it as better than the prior solution.”

And as part of its ongoing effort to connect its hybrid teams and enable dynamic collaboration from anywhere, Capital One also implemented Zoom Rooms. 

With Zoom Rooms, the teams at Capital One are empowered to participate and collaborate during meetings, whether they are in the office or at home, in the U.S. or abroad. And as an added bonus, Capital One found that Zoom Rooms were significantly easier to deploy than their legacy solution. 

“Zoom Rooms were the next logical step for us because it took the simplicity and intuitiveness of the desktop and allowed us to bring that into the conference room,” Love said. 

“Being able to walk into a Zoom Room and just click the button that says, ‘Join the meeting’, being able to see your participants and manage volume and sound, and then conducting your meeting, being able to wirelessly share content — it was almost a no-brainer for us to make that transition to Zoom Rooms,” Love added.

“The experience of being remote is that you are able to fully participate in the conversation and be able to innovate quickly — it’s almost as if you’re there in the room,” Love said. “Zoom closes the [geographic] distance and removes boundaries. Users can see each other, share content, and collaborate with colleagues across the U.S., Canada, U.K., India, and the Philippines.” 

“Within a day, we can have a Zoom Room installed,” Love added. “And we identified that the cost of deploying Zoom Rooms was about a third of the traditional conference rooms we had been deploying in the past.” 

The recruitment team at Capital One also used Zoom to transform its operations and expand the reach of its program.

“By shifting to virtual [recruiting] and using tools like Zoom, we’ve been able to triple our engagement with historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions,” Keegan said. “We’ve been able to double the amount of attendees without increasing the total number of events so that’s a lot more individuals and a lot more relationships that we are able to build.”

The talent and recruitment team even found ways to enhance communication with candidates and new hires.

“The various filters and settings within Zoom help us to capture the mood, help us capture the moment,” Steals said. “We utilize the whiteboard not only for interviewing but also for our training and development sessions.”

Enabling future innovation

As Capital One moves into the future, Zoom will continue to play a vital role in helping the organization bring on new talent and empower that talent to innovate for Capital One customers. 

“We expect that as time goes on, this also will further enhance our employees’ ability to innovate and to be able to effectively communicate and really be productive and really drive solutions that will power this company,” Love said.

“We’re highly collaborative, we’re people-centered, we’re interested in moving ourselves and our goals to the next level,” Steals added. “Zoom is, I believe, the ideal tool to suit the culture that we are and that we strive to be at Capital One.”