Hollywood Bowl

Leading the way with talent

Hollywood Bowl Group’s success and continued growth has seen it become the market leader in the bowling category, whilst also leading the way in the leisure sector. It has big plans to expand further and that’s why it is always on the lookout for talented new people to join its 2000+ enthusiastic and engaging team members.

The Group’s 60 Hollywood Bowl and AMF Bowling centres across the UK have a reputation for providing outstanding family entertainment – and its people underpin its ability to deliver the best leisure experience for every customer.

Hollywood Bowl Group wanted to continue improving its talent pipeline and recruit highly motivated, engaged individuals who were looking for a rewarding career. They wanted to optimise their recruitment journey and fully immerse candidates in the employer brand for a great online experience.

The Company was no stranger to Applicant Tracking Systems but knew to support future recruitment requirements, it needed an ATS and Recruitment CRM platform that could add value at every stage of the recruitment journey and be integrated into its careers site.

The previous system hadn’t evolved and was becoming increasingly more difficult to use. The candidate process was a long and disjointed process, for example, candidates who applied would have to activate their account to submit an application, often resulting in huge drop off rates. There were no social sharing elements to share vacancies to candidate networks. Any changes to the previous system, even small changes were incurring development costs which was not sustainable.

Selecting a new ATS would allow Hollywood Bowl to deliver the best user experience for all recruitment stakeholders and target candidates alike.

Steps to Success

We got stakeholders involved in the implementation project from the beginning, to create the vision for a new system,” Laura Purvis, Recruitment Manager at Hollywood Bowl Group explains. “We looked externally to research ideas and map out requirements for a new, more modern system that identified a need for a better user experience for all, flexible communication through email and text, integration with our HR system, social referrals, online onboarding and success tracking.

This provided the foundation for a clear brief of requirements for the tender process to select the best fit for purpose system to support the future growth and recruitment needs of the business.

Eploy was selected as the end-to end E-recruitment platform to support the Group’s recruitment strategy, because of the flexibility of the software to provide a much-improved candidate and user experience.  Alongside the core system, Eploy’s candidate portal provided a mobile responsive, consistent candidate journey across all devices that could be seamlessly integrated to the careers site.  The comprehensive Eploy onboarding platform would bring onboarding online and fully integrate with the existing HR system Fourth, which was not available with the previous ATS supplier.

The Recruitment Team works with multiple recruitment workflows for different areas of the business and roles which are configured to the Hollywood Bowl way of working within Eploy. This includes notifications, hiring manager permissions and transitions as candidates progress through the process. Hiring managers can now see where any candidate is in the process. They can filter by type or status and then work with applicants through each stage – updating statuses, creating interviews and providing feedback.

Laura Purvis, Recruitment Manager at Hollywood Bowl Group, said: “We can instantly see which candidates need to be contacted at each stage and can progress multiple candidates at any one time. We also have flexible communication with candidates through the email and SMS functionality within Eploy. This has been really useful for inviting people to recruitment events or trial shifts as well as sending e-signature offers and acceptance documents to successful applicants.

Roll-out across the business

Getting buy-in from Hiring managers was essential and this was achieved through regular and clear communication. “We held sessions across the UK with all 58 centre managers and were flexible on the training approach to suit requirements. Some of the hiring managers participated using their mobile phones, which evidenced the flexibility of the Eploy platform. We had access to training videos and guides and worked with managers to set up live vacancies in the training sessions. Hiring managers could easily see their current tasks, vacancies, offers and placements which promoted collaborative working to hire the best talent.

Hiring managers were surveyed and gave feedback on their experience which showed the centres were engaged and using the Eploy system extensively. This was a huge move forwards from the previous system, which, because if its inflexibility, led to frustrations of use.

The online onboarding was well received and a welcome improvement to the old process which was very time consuming. Managers would have to complete, print and post paper versions of the offer letter and contract and wait for them to be returned, so this new process where candidates e-sign their documents online was embraced by everyone. Having the signed documents stored online against the candidate record was also a step forward in ensuring the safety of personal data.

Success Tracking

Laura continued “The Recruitment Team are excited by the dashboards and analytics that we now have access to. We can see recruitment performance in real-time and take action through the drill-down from the headline numbers. We know that 46% of people applying for a role with us are using a mobile device, but previously had no visibility of where candidates came from and how they interacted with us.

Hollywood Bowl received 5000 applicants for the first advertised roles. In 3 months over 22,000 applications were received which was a real achievement compared with the previous system, which only reached around 50,000 applications in a 12 month period.

The dashboard flexibility made the tracking of data so easy. Hiring Managers could at a glance see where all of their candidates were in the process, receive notifications and quickly spot any bottlenecks in the process.

The next stage for Hollywood Bowl Group is to continue engaging with individuals and passive candidates whilst introducing situational judgement tests into the application process. Investing in ongoing recruitment improvements is all part of the company’s continued commitment to attracting and maintaining the very best talent in every area of the business – from the front-of-house team right through to the support centre team.

Chris Bogh, CTO at Eploy, commented:Hollywood Bowl Group wanted to provide a great experience for everyone in the recruitment process and now have a full talent engagement platform to manage these relationships more effectively. Integration with their careers site provides an extensive search capability by keyword, location and detailed map view and internal vacancies can be viewed separately to facilitate promotion from within. It’s been great to work with Hollywood Bowl to provide the user experience they to attract and retain the very best talent through Eploy.