Overview of the Situation
With a constant need to recruit for the next operation, and a desire to not make mistakes when selecting candidates, we had to reinvent the methods of assessing candidates before offering contracts. Typically, the recruitment process was a system of advertising, interviewing, and deciding on someone’s ability in less than an hour – our view was that this needed to change as the individuals would be representing the brand and therefore needed to be the very best of the very best.
The Problem They Faced
Whilst the labour turnover was not an issue for the business, there was a concern that there was not enough challenge during the recruitment stage to ensure that successful applicants had the appropriate skills to perform well from day one, or that if there were gaps, they were easily filled through training and coaching.
The Causes of the Problem
The problem with the process was purely down to the heritage of the business in that it used one method of recruiting all the field teams and had not tried anything different for many years. The business was nervous to make the change and internally didn’t have the skills to create an interactive assessment day which could deliver better end results.
The Impact of the Problem
The impact of not changing was that better candidates were potentially slipping through the net, due to freezing when interviewed, due to the nature of how an interview is conducted. As well as this, using interviews as the methods to decide on who should be part of the team relied heavily on the interviewer’s own opinion.
The Promise / Plan
Our commitment was to:
- Generate an entire assessment day campaign process that had over 20 mix and match exercises
- Create a workflow for each day that would challenge the applicants in group and 121 sessions and explore their abilities to carry out activities that were in keeping with the jobs they had applied for
- Build the process in a way that ensured language was not a barrier, meaning the process could be delivered in any market, globally
- Train the team on how to deliver the process, how to score the applicants, and how to edit each activity so that they could maintain this programme and keep it fresh
The Outcome
Using our processes, the business was able to:
- Conduct 20+ assessment centres within the initial two years of going live
- Deliver this process in twelve countries and seven different languages
- Recruit over 55 new salespeople, 8 trainers and 3 senior managers
