Saville Assessment was applauded for its approach to identifying its clients’ needs during the pandemic, earning it the Resourcing Supplier of the Year title. We take a look at the company’s winning entry and those of our other finalists.
WINNER
Saville Assessment
When recruitment slowed down last year, Saville Assessment found it vital to adapt, both in terms of growth/business continuity and how it supported its clients. Its leadership team carried out a “flight plan”, involving interviews with more than 20 business leaders about their challenges, future plans and support required. A key theme identified was the need for new hires to maintain drive and show resilience during challenging times.
With increased remote working, there has been a strong focus on the onboarding process and more pressure on hiring managers to ensure new starters are equipped with a toolkit to accelerate their journey. There was a gap in the market for a tool to measure both resilience and agility, and it was up to Saville Assessment to provide a solution that helped recruiters. Part of the solution was Match 6.5, a new behavioural screener. This unique tool takes just 6.5 minutes to complete and is extremely predictive of workplace performance. An early adopter of the tool was a global insurance company looking to transform its sales hiring process. Another example of innovation in assessment was Saville Assessment’s partnership with technology giants Fujitsu, with which it developed an immersive situational judgment test that provided a realistic preview of graduate life, which was used alongside an aptitude test.
Saville Assessment’s flight plan led to an agile development programme for a new model and report measuring resilient agility. This involved looking at over 10 years of existing data to understand the behaviours associated with resilience, agility, and their link to workplace performance.
The insurance client said “the new solution has transformed the way we hire by using a data-driven approach.” Fujitsu, meanwhile saw an increase of 19% in the cultural diversity of its talent pipeline thanks to Saville Assessment’s input.
Our judges felt its entry was a great demonstration how programmes can be tailored the needs of an individual business.
RUNNERS-UP
Giant Screening
The company aims to remove its clients’ administrative burdens when completing pre-employment screening by offering a bespoke managed service delivered through cloud-based mobile-enabled software. Determined to ensure a high quality candidate journey, Giant Screening provides the tailored technology and industry knowledge needed to bring recruits on board efficiently and compliantly.
The company seeks to ensure its culture and values are built around transparency and honesty. To support staff over the extremely difficult past 12 months it introduced a monthly ‘development dozen’ training course, which all employees are invited to attend during work hours. These sessions support employee wellbeing, organisation skills, motivation and more.
Recently, Giant Screening has added financial conduct checks and media searches. This is in line with its continued commitment to being able to support all companies in any industry.
Clients such as Keystream testify how Giant Screening “onboarded workers quickly and efficiently”, and Begbies Traynor says Giant Screening’s “personal attention” helped improve its candidate journey.
The company regularly hears from clients about positive feedback from their candidates on the onboarding process and gains a lot of satisfaction when clients come back with impressive results such as Keystream’s 57% cost saving or when Next Stage said Giant Screening had “reduced the number of people waiting to start by 20%”.
PeopleScout
Resourcing suppliers often use the term “extension of your team” to describe the relationship they aspire to with their clients. Over the past 12 months, PeopleScout has accelerated its relationship with Highways England to the point where its collaboration can be described accurately by this description.
In December 2019, Highways England formulated an aspirational programme for its talent acquisition department identifying several challenges. In response to these, John Maguire, PeopleScout’s client relationship director, set about forming strong working partnerships with two principal contacts on the client-side: Natalie Jones, a talent acquisition lead for early talent and Mark Thomas-Davies, another talent acquisition lead.
PeopleScout successfully managed the outsourcing of not only the annual graduate hiring intake but also the annual apprentice’s cohort. This has been extended to industry placements, based on the success of the last 12-month campaign. In total this spanned 55 hires in 2020/21. It also leveraged its expertise to advise on the most effective media channels and obtain the best pricing.
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During lockdown, PeopleScout created a bespoke, virtual assessment (including an assessment content re-design) for all early talent hires and also helped coordinate and implement virtual careers days for prospective applicants.
PeopleScout has elevated the sophistication of Highways England’s talent attraction capabilities by building a job posting and copywriting service for all online advertising. The result of its marketing strategy saw applicant numbers for early careers rise by 60%, female applicants rose by 8% and BAME applicants by 7%, year on year with the senior search service saving Highways England £6,000 per hire, (when compared with engaging third party agencies). Highways England has saved in excess of £50,000 on advertising costs, compared with standard rates.
