Innovative technology and automation delivers a superb candidate experience at Dee Set, which won the 2022 Candidate Experience Award. Judges praised its creative work and fantastic results.
WINNER
Dee Set in partnership with eArcu
Dee Set is a retail provider offering merchandising, fulfilment, distribution, and store development services. Its talent acquisition team hires 1,500 merchandisers per year, among other roles.
When attracting talent, Dee Set finds itself competing with the very retailers it works with for candidates. The brand alone is not well recognised, and used to find it hard to bring its jobs and culture to life for candidates. The company decided it had to establish itself as an employer of choice, differentiating itself from competitors with an outstanding candidate journey.
A new ATS platform was implemented to gain a competitive edge through an improved candidate experience, creating a sense of belonging at the very start, from landing on the careers site, to their first day with a simple, consistent, and exciting recruitment journey. The adoption of Google for Jobs allowed job seekers to be redirected to the Dee Set careers site rather than via job boards or aggregators. The company put in place a tracking mechanism for its vacancy advert performance, using targeted programmatic advertising to ensure job adverts were visible to the right people, at the right time.
Looking for jobs is now easier, with the search and apply button always within reach, geolocation and filters. Job ads are more engaging and compliant thanks to the introduction of Advert Analyser insights. This feature, seamlessly managed within the recruitment platform, helps to remove unconscious bias and creates engaging and inclusive copy that’s more attractive to job seekers. In the past 12 months, 1,711 new joiners have joined Dee Set, with automation reducing Time to Hire (from application to completing the onboarding process) to 17 days on average, with the entire process taking just over one hour of candidates’ time. More than 26,500 applications have been received since the successful completion of the transformation project with an 83% completion rate on new chat interview assessment, with 76% being conducted on mobile devices. Some 11,000 candidates have been interviewed with less than 19 minutes to complete the interview.
RUNNERS-UP
Dishoom
By July 2021, it took usually more than two weeks to recruit skilled new-starters in London and experienced staff were leaving the industry. The pingdemic meant that on any one shift, nearly 15% of Dishoom’s team was absent. Across its London restaurants, nearly 1-in-5 front of house roles were vacant yet the restaurants were busier than ever.
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To better train new staff, the chain decided to start from scratch taking a short-term lease on an unused office, bringing in crockery, wine glasses, cocktail shakers, a projector and moved the first two-days of new-starter training to its new space. It created a step-by-step induction schedule that was culture saturated, focused on anticipating guest needs and delivered blended learning to new barbacks, bartenders, bussers, food runners, expeditors, servers, and hosts, before they continued their training in their cafes.
To deliver the programme meant, among other things, upskilling its training team to teach any department and lead weekly classes of 30+, inviting in senior managers to meet new starters and promoting star performers on the spot.
During the training, Dishoom managed to deliver 168 hours of training, hold sessions with up to 75 new-starters, and trained 492 new starters. Because of the programme’s success, the company now sees its recruitment streams differently. It has seen that it can recruit team members with no hospitality experience and get them up to speed rapidly.
IWG
IWG is a provider of flexible workspace and has 12,000-plus employees in more than 120 countries. It predominantly recruits for volume roles and, in the past year, hired about 4,000 new talent across all its brands globally. The challenge for IWG was attracting the right talent and creating a better awareness of the brand. The career site was failing to provide an engaging candidate experience and lacked the content to inform the candidate sufficiently about the business, culture, and what it’s like to work for IWG.
The new career site goals were to put the candidate being at the forefront of the design by creating a clear, effective journey. Navigation had to be clear with relevant and engaging content, and simple search features. The site had to be a shop window for the newly defined EVP and give potential candidates full ownership of their decision to apply by subtly increasing brand awareness and portraying an authentic view of the organisation and key positions.
As a result, IWG not only produced an engaging and candidate-friendly career site, but one that pushes innovative design and technological boundaries with standout features. Applications are up since launch, by 26%, with the firm receiving almost 35,000 applications over the past three months. There has been an increase in the number of candidates reaching interview stage of 66% since the launch. Users are spending more time on the career site (from 50 seconds to 3.33 minutes), and are now viewing an average of 3.64 pages, thanks to video content, podcasts, and engaging information. The next phase will see the career site evolve even further, with video job adverts to build even more awareness of the roles, development of the IWG internal career site, and dynamic navigation to send visitors on a journey around the site using user analytics and behaviours.
Paddy Power
With 628 shops and 3,500 employees, Paddy Power Betfair is the largest bookmaking retailer in Ireland, and one of the fastest-growing retail businesses in the UK. Attrition is typically high in retail roles: the Talent Acquisition team brings in around 1,400 hires, with up to 30,000 applications, a year.
The onboarding experience, although functional, did not provide candidates with a consistent and engaging experience, lacking in informative and relatable content. The process was very labour intensive, manual, and inefficient; with various spreadsheets being used to manage the process and contracts being generated manually.
The team took the opportunity to start a comprehensive process review. Performing a gap analysis review over several sessions, the team identified all the relevant employee and candidate touchpoints, along with producing an offers and onboarding process flow to compare the current “as is” experience with the “to be” improved journey.
Technology was optimised and automated to enable multiple contract generation at the click of a button, introducing e-signatures, triggering emails automatically and next steps based on decision. Within 30 seconds a contract can now be generated and sent to a candidate.
The results have been dramatic, the firm says, with a 43% reduced onboarding time, and contracts and onboarding forms completed in one day, where before it could take 7-9 days. It has seen a 9% increase in induction show rate and an 80% savings in efficiency, which the team can now spend on direct sourcing to help with the attraction problems the industry is facing.
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