A Recipe for Hiring Success: Samworth Brothers & Eploy

Samworth Brothers is a fourth-generation family business producing high-quality chilled and ambient foods enjoyed by millions of people across the UK every day. They employ over 10,000 people in well-invested, modern food manufacturing sites nationwide.

Samworth Brothers produce own-label goods for the UK’s top supermarkets and food service businesses and owns some of Britain’s best-loved food brands such as Ginsters, Soreen and Urban Eat. The company is supported by its own supply chain logistics and food safety businesses.

The focus at Samworth Brothers is underpinned by a strong set of values that sets out how they behave as a business and with each other. These values underpin finding the best people within and outside the organisation to strengthen the business. The Resourcing Team constantly works to improve the recruitment experience for candidates and for hiring managers to attract and hire the best.

The Resourcing Team manage both the production based roles and the wider business function based positions. Until recently recruitment was managed through multiple spreadsheets and tools within Office 365 with manual posting to various job boards. Managing recruitment this way has been challenging, especially with a significant volume of live roles varying from around 400-900 roles at any one time.

To move the function forward and improve the candidate and hiring manager experience, Samworth Brothers Resourcing recognised that an ATS was needed to support and grow with the business ambitions. Following a rigorous multi stage evaluation of best-of-breed Talent Acquisition platforms, Samworth Brothers selected Eploy’s Applicant Tracking System and Recruitment CRM to support its plan, putting candidate experience at the heart of talent acquisition and recruitment - from raising a request to recruiting and onboarding.

Key reasons for selecting Eploy:

• Functionally rich Applicant Tracking System with flexibility and customisation
• Future-proofing recruitment for business growth.
• Flexibility for multi-brand customisation across the recruitment process.
• Platform supportive of internal mobility and succession planning.
• Intuitive system for Hiring Managers.

Kate Prime, Group Resourcing Partner at Samworth Brothers, commented, “We selected a partner that we believed could help us to deliver our next steps in resourcing and have been working with Eploy to build our People Portal Resourcing offering for the Group. Eploy provided a robust sandbox testing environment that enabled us to evaluate and rigorously test everything before going live. The feedback from our hiring managers has been positive, as the Eploy platform is very intuitive and increases the visibility and ownership of their vacancies. The system implementation has embodied our value of ‘Making Things Happen’, and we absolutely ‘Take Pride’ in our recruitment achievements to date.

Kate Lee, Talent & Resourcing Manager added, ‘'Eploy have supported us through our build process and combined with Jodie Gilligan, our own Project Manager, they have kept us on track, listened to what we needed and always presented options not just one solution. For our candidates the introduction of the system and our new careers site puts the control back in their hands, with the ability for them to keep track of their applications and sign up to job alerts, so that they don’t miss their perfect next step. The other big win for us is the availability of data, and we look forward to using this going forward to continue to develop our processes and the system as we feel that there is so much more opportunity to grow and we feel that Eploy match our ambitions in terms of that continual eye on the future.”

You can take a look at Samworth Brothers new careers site.