Crafting the perfect career with Aardman

Aardman’s adeptness of engaging audiences with compelling stories told through animation has earned the company a deserved worldwide reputation.

Their multi-award-winning work produces a unique brand of feature films, series, advertising, games and interactive entertainment for a global audience. The studio has received ten Academy Award® nominations, and has won four.

As a world class, independent studio, known for producing household names such as Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, Morph, Chicken Run and many more, their work continues to be innovative, entertaining, brilliantly characterised and full of charm, reflecting the talent, energy and personal commitment of all the people who comprise the Aardman team.

The team has big plans to support careers in animation for emerging and diverse talent and having outgrown their ATS, called on Eploy to implement a complete recruitment platform for a strategic approach to recruitment.

Eploy’s cloud-based talent acquisition software was selected to support the attraction, engagement, recruitment and onboarding of the perfect talent to the Aardman crew.

The quick launch project with Eploy involved the implementation and set-up of the core Eploy Core System, Hiring Manager Portal, Vendor Portal and Candidate Portal, delivered over a rapid 4-week cycle.

There were some key deliverables to achieve across the recruitment journey:

• Deliver a stellar candidate experience to engage and attract more candidates
• Streamline the candidate process and immerse and inspire as many people as possible to want to work in the industry
• Underpin the Company Diversity & Inclusion charter through the recruitment process.
• Simplify the job posting process. The original process relied on individually posting each job across chosen job boards.
• Understand the candidate audience diversity data to address where the challenges lie and change how to reach underrepresented groups
• Access and use Data & Metrics across the recruitment process to make improvements
• Reflect the new visual identity across the candidate experience
• Provide more personal feedback to unsuccessful candidates
• Have robust GDPR compliance such as consent management and preferences
• Build a talent pool so hiring managers could search talent pools and pro-actively recruit

Implementing Eploy

Aardman designed a simplistic registration and application process in Eploy for candidates to register and apply that uses vacancy-based conditions depending on if a portfolio is required. This tailored process used Eploy Discover to customise the online application forms that give the candidate the option to upload a portfolio file or add a hyperlink to a portfolio website to capture everything that is required and move candidates to the next stage.

The Recruitment Team is also using Eploy’s Multi-Poster to send vacancy details to preferred job boards. By sending the same vacancy simultaneously to the chosen job boards, the team saves time and can better manage vacancies, applicant tracking, and candidate management.

Claire Brindley, Senior HR Advisor, commented on the implementation, “The configuration of Eploy was easy to adapt and enabled us to go live rapidly. As part of Aardman’s long-term plan for recruitment aligned to projects and company growth, Eploy provides the ability to grow with us and engage hiring managers and candidates. The talent pooling features mean we can proactively recruit and filter for candidates who have applied for roles previously. The Eploy dashboards will enable us to securely collect ED&I data, and display our progress, identifying areas for improvement to achieve our diversity goals.

“The project coincides with a Netflix partnership on a new programme to encourage emerging and diverse talent to consider a career in animation and extends the reach of our efforts and support the professional development of those already in the industry. It’s a really exciting time to join Aardman.”

Take a look at what it is like to be part of the Aardman community of talented people and the latest careers including animators, gameplay roles, trainee roles and more!

About Aardman 

Aardman, based in Bristol (UK) and co-founded in 1976 by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, is an independent and multi-Academy Award® and BAFTA® award winning studio. It produces feature films, series, advertising, games and interactive entertainment – current animated productions include; brand new 2021 holiday specials Robin Robin and Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas, CGI series Lloyd of the Flies, a new stop motion series for pre-schoolers The Very Small Creatures and a Chicken Run movie sequel.

Its productions are global in appeal, novel, entertaining, brilliantly characterised and full of charm reflecting the unique talent, energy and personal commitment of the Aardman team. The studio’s work – which includes the creation of much-loved characters including Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, Timmy Time and Morph – is often imitated, and yet the company continues to lead the field producing a rare brand of visually stunning content for cinema, broadcasters, digital platforms and live experiences around the world. Recent celebrated projects include the ‘visually astonishing’ (Guardian), BAFTA® nominated console game, 11-11: Memories Retold, the four-times Gold Cannes Lions-winning StorySign app, AR experience Wallace & Gromit: The Big Fix up - and innovative attractions for both the domestic and international market, including a 4D theatre attraction at Efteling in the Netherlands.

The studio runs the Aardman Academy which has a commitment to nurturing talent by delivering excellence in film and animation training and mentoring. The Aardman Academy offers a variety of courses from intensive one-day workshops teaching production skills and storyboarding, to comprehensive twelve-week courses for professionals in craft based subjects from model making to animation.

In November 2018 it became an Employee Owned Organisation, to ensure Aardman remains independent and to secure the creative legacy and culture of the company for many decades to come.