Wren Kitchens scoops award win with The Firm

Wren Kitchens, the UK’s No.1 kitchen retailer, is a passionate family-owned British manufacturer and retailer of fitted kitchens. Since its launch in 2009, the goal has been to be number one in all aspects of its business and the markets they operate, relentlessly pursuing excellence and growth.

Wren Recruitment Team have gone the extra mile over the last 12 months, and their efforts continue to be recognised, this time at The Firm Awards 2022, which took place at the Connaught Hotel, London.

The Firm Awards 2022 announced Wren Kitchens as well-deserved winners of the Best Onboarding Experience Award. This category recognises and acknowledges outstanding development and delivery of an effective pre-boarding and onboarding strategy for all new hires.

Outstanding onboarding achievements

At the start of 2021, Wren decided to revamp their onboarding process for each business area in the UK and USA businesses. The strategy was to improve the process for new employees and the experience for internal recruitment and HR teams, as well as Hiring Managers.

When revamping the onboarding processes, the team had three clear objectives:

• Provide a world-class onboarding process for every new starter
• Provide a tailored onboarding process for each business area
• Provide a positive experience which is on-brand and mirrors Wren EVP

As a large, complex business that recruits for 400 different positions across many business areas in the UK and USA, this was not an easy task!

They identified key business areas that needed a unique onboarding process due to the information required from a new employee.

What Wren Kitchens Recruitment Team delivered was quite phenomenal:

• Reduced the number of new starter no-shows on their first day to 1.35%
• Improved the retention rate of new starters over key short-term milestones
• Reduced the number of new employees contacting the recruitment and HR teams for help during the onboarding process due to improved communication and the candidate experience
• Improved overall new employee feedback survey score for the onboarding process to 4.7 out of 5
• Improved overall Hiring Manager feedback survey score for the onboarding process

Commenting on the recent success, Jonathan Simmons, Head of Recruitment Operations at Wren Kitchens, said “We are incredibly pleased with this recognition, as it demonstrates that we were right to revamp our onboarding process and implement a new strategy to improve our employee experience. We used minimal external resources to build and implement the new onboarding process, utilising training from Eploy and the flexibility of Eploy’s Applicant Tracking System and Onboarding module to build and implement this with our internal team, resulting in zero external cost”.

“We can now onboard remote workers across the UK and have a fully functioning model for international remote workers set up for the future. We have adapted our process to support real-world changes forced upon our business, such as the adaptation to remote working caused by the global pandemic. Not only have we built a remote working onboarding process that suits our current business model, but we also built the model to anticipate changes to our working policy in the future. The feedback from our Board of Directors has been very positive.”

In addition, Wren Kitchens Recruitment Team was highly commended in the Best Internal Mobility Strategy. You can view the Winners of 2022 here.

Wren Kitchens continues to be on a roll with their award success and are shortlisted for Best Candidate Experience in the Recruiter Awards 2022, taking place on 25 September.
Read about Wren Kitchen’s recruitment journey case study and how they approached ‘introducing a revised direct recruitment model and adapting to business need’.

Visit Wren Kitchens careers site.