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Openreach Leadership Programme – Directors of Tomorrow

Posted on by cevans
Openreach Leadership Programme: Directors of Tomorrow

Openreach Leadership Programme: Directors of Tomorrow

One of the world’s largest communication organisations, Openreach, were after a sourcing-led recruitment solution involving a thorough assessment design to deliver a brand new leadership programme for eight to 10 future directors.

Situation

Openreach approached PeopleScout to help them stand up and deliver a new senior leadership programme which would allow starters to rotate through a series of roles to provide them with the skills needed to be successful in a director position.

Openreach wanted PeopleScout to drive the assessment process and to source candidates for the programme, presenting a list of the most suitable top candidates. The roles included:

  • Senior Engineering Area / Regional Manager Fibre Network & Delivery (FND)
  • Chief Engineer – Senior Operations Manager
  • Senior Area Manager – Service Delivery

The aim of the programme was to improve diversity and innovative thinking within the business. The business to date was lacking in gender and ethnic diversity, with most employees coming from a telecoms background. Openreach wanted to bring in candidates from diverse backgrounds with experience managing large operational teams outside of the telecoms sector. To do this, we interviewed senior leaders and heads of resourcing to understand the transferrable skills they were looking for. From this we were able to make a target list of industries and organisations which had similarities. These included field operations and management, logistics, and engineering as well as consumer-centric operations such as retail.

Openreach also wanted to improve career pathways within the business. So, our second aim was to support internal mobility by introducing a new step stone between senior management and director levels.

Our team were given a short time frame of just four weeks to create a solution and design the process. Plus, we would then have to present candidates to Openreach for interviews in a competitive market.

Solution

Our team were tasked with attracting and sourcing candidates, designing and supporting the assessment centre and completing the recruiter screening. Our solution also included a candidate attraction marketing campaign, including writing job copy and building a microsite.

Advertising Plan

Our skilled team devised an inclusive and effective advertising plan. This involved creating a tailor-made job advert and a microsite containing relevant and exciting content about the opportunities available. Using imagery and quotes from their current directors, we brought the Openreach story to life and showed what real employees’ roles looked like. We supported our diversity goal by using both female and male directors in the attraction content.

The microsite played the biggest part in telling the story, taking potential Future Leadership programme candidates through their first few years at the company, detailing where they’ll end up.

We partnered with Openreach’s media partner for the campaign strategy for which LinkedIn was predominantly used. Posts from employees were used as well as brand-led posts that recruiters leveraged to highlight roles. We again drove our diversity objectives by using more women in our social media posts to amplify their voices.

A Sourcing-Led Approach

To begin, the recruitment process was sourcing-led, focusing on the candidate experience and the thorough qualification of candidates. We also specifically targeted passive candidates from different industries with key transferrable skills. In order to help bring the role to life, we were able to direct candidates towards the microsite and video content that PeopleScout created for the campaign.

Assessment

Our team worked with Openreach senior leaders to design an assessment solution, involving job analysis and a competency assessment framework. This enabled us to create a stepwise assessment process to evaluate candidates through cognitive testing and personality profiling. The penultimate stage involved a competency-based interview to identify a shortlist of candidates to present to Openreach for final interviews.

The assessment design included a feedback report from the interview panel for each candidate as well as a feedback interview for candidates who completed the testing stage.

Results

PeopleScout’s assessment design for Openreach led to:

  • All required roles filled

Amongst the new joiners, 25% identified as female and another 25% identified as Asian or Black. All selected hires scored highly in both the online test assessment and the interview.

  • 3:1 interview-to-offer acceptance

Our detailed assessment process was a good predictor of success. From the 81 candidates who were screened by recruiters, 34 candidates were selected for assessment, with 23 advanced final interviews. Out of the 23, 10 were offered roles with eight acceptances.

The overall process from start to finish included a collaborative relationship from all teams at Openreach and PeopleScout to successfully deliver a brand new programme.

Ten months on from the candidate’s start date, we can confirm they have all successfully passed probation and are all actively working towards a director position.

AT A GLANCE

  • COMPANY
    Openreach
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing
  • ANNUAL HIRES
    10 Future Leadership programme candidates
CONTACT US

“PeopleScout were really thorough, understood our requirements and ensured that they were able to accurately represent our business and the specific roles we were recruiting for. Communication throughout the process was excellent and they delivered the end result we were looking for.  When we surveyed our new joiners about their pre-hire experience, without exception they all held PeopleScout in high regard. We would have no hesitation in using PeopleScout in the future.”

Katrina Baillie, Head of Resourcing, Openreach

Reducing Time-to-Hire for a British Charity with a Bespoke RPO Solution

Posted on by akessler
Reducing Time-to-Hire for a British Charity with a Bespoke RPO Solution

Project RPO

Reducing Time-to-Hire for a British Charity with a Bespoke RPO Solution

A higher education charity partnered with PeopleScout for a bespoke RPO solution, reducing time-to-hire for professional and academic roles, with a challenging four-week timeframe.

82% % offer acceptance rate
extended partnership beyond initial project
extended partnership beyond initial project
44 days from brief to offer acceptance

Situation

Our client, a charity, works with higher education institutions across the world to improve higher education for staff, students and global communities. The charity organisation needed to fill 30 roles across a range of job families and levels, including professional and academic positions.

They had a challenging timescale of just four weeks to go-live. Plus, they were facing several challenges, including an ambitious growth strategy to support their multi-year plan for which filling these roles was critical.

They engaged PeopleScout to augment their small in-house team, increasing capacity and boosting speed, through project RPO.

Solution

Our skilled senior recruiters acted as brand ambassadors and became an extension of the in-house team, optimising and managing our client’s recruitment process from attraction to offer for a four-month bespoke RPO solution. PeopleScout managed each role in its entirety, from briefing through to verbal offer acceptance, including creating a sourcing and attraction plan for each role.

As the client was a first-generation RPO client, we were able to quickly identify the need to make proactive recommendations based on labour market analysis and recruitment best practices, working collaboratively with the hiring managers. As part of the project, we utilised Avature to enable better data analysis. This helped the client to make better data driven decisions, monitoring their EDI agenda and improving the candidate journey.

Throughout the project, we gathered market feedback and tracked hiring metrics, presenting it through bespoke dashboards to guide hiring decisions. The organisation received weekly reports and regular analysis of market insights, salary benchmarks and candidate feedback.

We also leveraged the expertise of a dedicated PeopleScout recruitment marketer to create engaging copy and advise on the best supplementary media options to target our talent audiences. Our recruitment marketing strategy included a social media attraction campaign to further increase brand awareness in the market. Plus, we built a custom landing page, which showcased the charity’s employer value proposition (EVP), which help to attract high quality talent.

On top of these attraction efforts, our recruiters directly sourced passive candidates to further raise our client’s profile in the market.

Results

Our consultative approach to hiring and our tailored strategies for each role resulted in:

  • An 82% offer acceptance rate.
  • An enhanced candidate and hiring manager experience, which led to the charity extending the partnership.
  • An increase in diversity within the roles filled.
  • A reduction in average time from briefing to offer acceptance, which dropped to just 44 days

AT A GLANCE

  • COMPANY
    UK-Based Higher Education Charity
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Talent Advisory
Contact Sales

PeopleScout UK Jobs Report Analysis — November 2019

Posted on by nfuqua

The November Labour Market Report released by the Office for National Statistics which includes the quarter covering July through September 2019 reported that 58,000 jobs were lost as the unemployment rate fell to 3.8%. Nominal wages showed an annual increase of 3.6%.

uk jobs report infographic

Notable figures from the September report include:

  • The UK employment rate was estimated at 76.0%; 0.5 percentage points higher than a year earlier but 0.1 percentage points lower than last quarter.
  • Job vacancies which were measured for the period covering August through October showed a decline of 18,000 openings compared to the quarter that ended in July.
  • Estimated annual growth in average weekly earnings for employees was 3.6% for both total pay (including bonuses) and regular pay (excluding bonuses). This is a decrease of .02 percentage points from last month’s report.

Job Losses Continued and the Unemployment Rate Fell

In the third quarter of 2019, the economy shed 58,000 jobs, following the decline of 56,000 positions reported last month. The loss was less severe than analysts had predicted—including a Reuters poll of economists which forecasted a median drop of 94,000 jobs. This was the largest drop since the three months ending in May 2015. The number of females in employment dropped by a notable 93,000. Among the reasons that this is a concerning figure is that women have been a driving force in the UK’s job gains in recent years. One important contributor to this decline are the continuing job losses in the retail sector.

Despite the loss of jobs, the unemployment rate fell to 3.8%. This is the lowest level since 1975, which is before the living memory of much of the nation’s workforce. Annual labour market numbers are still strong. There are 323,000 more people working in the UK than a year earlier. The job losses in the quarter were driven by a decrease of 164,000 part-time jobs which was offset by an impressive gain of 106,000 full-time positions.

In Northern Ireland, unemployment fell to a remarkable low of just 2.5%, a level more likely to be found in high-growth Asian nations than in a developed European economy.

Falling Vacancies, EU Nationals Leaving and Slowing Growth

The drop of 18,000 job vacancies from the previous quarter brought the number of decreased vacancies over the last year to 53,000. This is the fifth consecutive annual fall which suggests a trend of diminishing job openings.

Approximately 131,000 EU nationals left work in the UK over the quarter which is the largest decrease since the Office for National Statistics (ONS) began collecting records 21 years ago. This drop outnumbered the additional 125,000 UK nationals who entered employment.

Annual wage increases slowed to 3.6% which is still well ahead of the rate of inflation. However, if the demand for workers continues to fall, wage growth may continue to stagnate as well.

The nation’s economic growth rate is at its slowest in almost a decade, expanding by just 0.3% in the third quarter. This follows a contraction of 0.2% in the second quarter of 2019. Some economists are citing uncertainty over Brexit for the anemic economic figures:

“Tej Parikh, chief economist at the Institute of Directors, said that ‘a return to growth is welcome news, but narrowly avoiding a recession is nothing to celebrate.

The UK economy has been in stop-start mode all year, with growth punctuated by the various Brexit deadlines,’ he added.”

Everything is Possible

UK employers should look beyond the headlines and view this month’s report in context. Unemployment has not been lower in decades and 800,000 job vacancies are waiting to be filled. The result of next month’s election may or may not result in greater clarity concerning Brexit. It is the continuing lack of clarity over the nation’s economic future that should lead employers to actively seek out expertise in talent recruitment and retention. A partner such as a recruitment process outsourcing company can provide a range of solutions resulting in success in an uncertain environment. And as the novelist Dame Margaret Drabble has written, “when nothing is sure, everything is possible.”