Arbuthnot Latham get into the detail of Eploy

The Recruitment Challenge

Just a few years ago there was no in-house recruitment team at Arbuthnot Latham and recruitment was managed through spreadsheets and paper-based processes. Much time was lost manually authorising vacancies, processing candidates and approving offers which was not efficient or sustainable for the bank or candidates. 

Following the appointment of a Recruitment Manager, key components of an in-house recruitment function were developed, a team established, and a strategy defined. 

The Recruitment Manager identified the need to build a robust, cost effective and pragmatic recruitment process that sourced the best and most relevant candidates. An early requirement was to implement an ATS and build an attractive, candidate friendly website.

Project scope & strategy

The recruitment team partnered with Eploy and together they configured a seamless, automated authorisation and recruitment process and created a fresh, motivating careers website that showcased Arbuthnot Latham’s focus on supporting clients to fulfil their passions, be it for Life or for Business. 

Having embedded the new paperless recruitment process, the recruitment team worked to enhance its sourcing strategy and candidate experience. The aim was to create a progressive, candidate friendly and business-optimal journey that reflected the bank’s values of Focus, Innovation, Reaching Excellence, and Sustainability. 

Historically the candidate journey comprised of a two-stage interview process (traditional interview and a competency-based interview) coupled with ad-hoc use of role plays and business plans. 

Using MI and feedback from the bank and candidates, it was clear that there was also a gap in objectively testing candidates, particularly in certain roles. There was also room for improvement in timeto-offer, agency spend and candidate care. 

In addition, the recruitment team wanted to help the bank embed and get the best out of their new recruits.

Goals

Five goals that the recruitment team wanted to achieve by improving the recruitment journey:

1. Ensure only the most relevant candidates are invited to interview. This would reduce the amount of time spent interviewing unsuccessful candidates and reduce the overall time-to-offer (value: Focus)
2. Include elements in the recruitment process that would objectively test a candidate’s ability for the role (value: Reaching Excellence)
3. Ensure that the bank got the best out of the people they hired (values: Sustainability and Teamwork)
4. Reduce agency spend (value: Sustainability)
5. Use technology to reach the above goals in a candidate and business friendly way, whilst enhancing communication throughout the process (value: Innovation)

There were several important factors that were considered as part of the planning process to achieve the goals. These included how the new journey would impact different teams, disrupt current processes, the infrastructure required to support the changes and budget restraints.

Having considered the various factors, the recruitment team decided to include a video interview stage between shortlisting and the first stage interview, a personality questionnaire and (where relevant) role-specific ability test(s) between the first and second stage interview. Both the video interview and tests had to be fully automated and embedded into the Eploy platform and be user friendly for candidates and hiring manager’s alike.

“Eploy is core to our automated recruitment process and was developed to fit our workflows. It was clear that whichever technologies we chose to enable our goals had to integrate with the Eploy system.” - William James, Recruitment Manager.

An integrated approach

When choosing suppliers for the new solutions Arbuthnot Latham considered: integration compatibility, system functionality / simplicity, cost and risk profile. Working with the Group HR Director, Legal and IT teams to select the most appropriate suppliers for their needs and to get contracts in place, they chose Launchpad (video interviews) and SHL (psychometric testing).

To connect the various parts of the workflow for a seamless experience, Launchpad, SHL and Eploy worked collaboratively to deliver various recruitment workflows when raising a vacancy:

• Interview only (1st interview & competency-based interview)
• Launchpad video & interview (Launchpad video interview, 1st interview, competency-based interview)
• SHL & interview (1st interview, SHL psychometric tests, competencybased Interview)
• Launchpad, SHL & interview (Launchpad video interview, 1st interview, SHL psychometric tests, competency-based interview) Eploy connects to Launchpad and SHL via an API where the appropriate set of video questions and psychometric tests can be selected via a drop-down menu.

Bring hiring managers into the E-Recruitment strategy...effortlessly

Once live, all applications and talent pooled candidates are listed against the vacancy in Eploy. The recruitment team share selected candidates with the Hiring Manager who have their own portal (GDPR compliant). The Hiring Manager selects which candidates to progress to video interview. Once the candidate has completed their video interview both the recruiter and the Hiring Manager can review/score/comment on the candidate’s answers via their portals and the Hiring Manager can progress or reject the candidate.

At the SHL psychometric testing stage both the recruiter and Hiring Manager can again review the test results/reports via their portals before progressing. The Hiring Manager also uses their portal to create candidate offers and send them for approval. Once approved, candidate information from Eploy is connected directly to the HR employee administration system.

Results

Through connecting Eploy with other recruitment technology tools, Arbuthnot Latham have enhanced the candidate journey and significantly reduced time-to-offer so the best candidates aren’t lost to other employers through the process. They have created an engaging candidate experience that has been designed around leaner processes that reduces margin of error and are better placed to identify top talent with precision and accuracy - at a much faster rate than if it were done manually. 

Costs have been reduced by eliminating time-consuming phone interviews and only scheduling face-to-face interviews with the best candidates. Agency use has reduced by higher quality candidates coming to first stage interview. Attrition rates have also reduced since the recruitment strategy implementation.

Hiring Managers have a better experience with a greater degree of flexibility and can work more effectively with the Recruitment & HR team with easy access to recruitment metrics and dashboards. For example, bottlenecks can be spotted easily and there is clear visibility of next steps and tasks required to secure the best talent faster. The in-house recruitment team has excelled in achieving their five stated goals and as a result significantly improved the quality of the candidate journey, the service delivered to their internal customers and overall staff retention.

“We now have a handle on ‘all things recruitment’ and work in partnership with other areas of the business and have brought subsidiaries into the centralised recruitment process. Now we can track and manage candidates, search and utilise our talent pools, and generate insightful MI through one core system that cleverly connects to other technologies.