University of East Anglia Adopts Eploy for Streamlined Recruitment and Better Candidate Experience

The University of East Anglia (UEA) has nurtured independent thinking since 1963. With its world leading research covering science, health and medicine, social sciences and the humanities, it addresses some of the biggest issues facing society today, from transforming the lives of children in state care to providing the global temperature records which inform international climate change policy.

The Resourcing Team is committed to attracting, engaging, recruiting and onboarding the best academic and professional talent. Unfortunately, the recruitment module used to facilitate this had limited functionality, provided a poor user experience, did not capture meaningful data and produced a lacklustre vacancies page, making recruitment extremely challenging.

When the recruitment module was being made obsolete by the vendor, the Resourcing Team took the opportunity to consider how the process could be revolutionised to provide an automated, efficient and streamlined process reducing time to hire, cost per hire, improving both user and candidate experience and capturing meaningful real-time data.

Having researched the market for potential solutions and features available, a scoping document was developed to find the right vendor who could deliver on essential and desirable requirements. Specific objectives included reducing and automating administrative tasks, eliminating duplication, inbuilt approval processes, self-service functionality, an attractive vacancies page and a positive user experience.

Eploy was selected after a thorough procurement process due to its ability to deliver all the features and functionality required, the flexibility to configure the platform on an ongoing basis to meet business need and impressive data and analytics dashboards.

Sam Swinton, Head of Resourcing at UEA commented, “As a University Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and diversifying our workforce is of significant importance and it was key for us to have a platform which was accessible and provided meaningful real-time data. I am delighted with the reporting dashboards within Eploy and pleased to say we now have recruitment metrics at the touch of a button which provide a foundation for making changes to the way we attract, engage, recruit and onboard talent to the University.

“Our previous system was not user friendly, and we knew it contributed to candidate drop out and poor user experience. We also knew that time to hire took longer than it needed to, exacerbated by the manual processes which created a number of queries from users and meant the continual chasing of documentation.

“What we now have in place is a self-service fully automated recruitment platform. The implementation of Eploy is mitigating queries that were typical from hiring managers and candidates to the Resourcing Team because of the intuitive nature of the core platform and portals.

“Working with Eploy to customise the ATS platform was a supportive and collaborative process. We were able to explore different approaches to find a solution to enable the platform to work in the way we envisaged. This included developing multiple vacancy authorisation workflows, some of which were complex, creating multiple application forms and tailoring these and the onboarding process to meet role requirements, and setting up a variety of email templates to engage with candidates at different stages of the process.

“Our new vacancies page is device responsive, as is the recruitment platform, and provides candidates with the ability to search for roles based on key words, location and/or function, select how they wish to view roles, enables them to register for job alerts and create their own Candidate Portal where they can keep track of their application status. Additional information, if relevant to the role, is also available alongside vacancies and is downloadable, as is detailed guidance for applicants on how to apply.

“The team at Eploy are amazing and have guided us through configuration and implementation seamlessly. They are always available to answer queries, had great supporting resources and the weekly meetings were vital in keeping momentum.

“We have had overwhelming positive feedback from hiring managers who have embraced the change with access to the tools they need. Initial feedback from candidates on the process has also been incredibly positive.

“We have achieved a great deal in a short time that now makes us more competitive as an employer and we have already seen a significant increase in the number of applications, Eploy believed this to be the most of any University within this time. We have also seen a reduction in the time candidates are taking to progress through the platform.

“By partnering with Eploy we have transformed the University’s recruitment process and the ability to attract, recruit, engage and onboard talent.

You can find out more about University of East Anglia and the careers on offer here: https://vacancies.uea.ac.uk/vacancies/vacancy-search-results.aspx