Wren Kitchens

Wren Kitchens introduced an award winning revised direct recruitment model to adapt to business needs.

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Retail, Wholesale & eCommerce
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0%Improved Offer Acceptance Rate

After implementing Eploy, Wren Kitchens saw an improvement of the offer acceptance rate.

0Large Talent Pool

Wren Kitchens have established a Talent pool of over 150,000 people.

0%Improved Direct Fill Rate

Over 96% of vacancies are filled by a direct source.

Wren Kitchens, the UK’s No.1 kitchen retailer, is a passionate family-owned British manufacturer and retailer of fitted kitchens.

Since their launch in 2009, their goal has been to be number one in all aspects of their business and the markets they operate, relentlessly pursuing excellence and growth. They have 8,500 employees in both UK and USA, having scaled from c2500 UK employees in July 2017 when Jonathan Simmons joined as Head of Recruitment Operations to create and build a recruitment model and team.

Recruitment has ramped up due to the success of the business and its US expansion. Further growth is also on the horizon.

Supporting Wren’s goal to pursue growth is the need for passionate, talented people to join their team, so managing recruitment effectively across the company is vital.

‘'Putting the candidate first is a priority for us and we have achieved this through implementing Eploy’s ATS and recruitment CRM. It gives candidates a seamless experience at every stage when searching and applying for roles and finding out more about life@Wren. It mirrors the commitment to our people, giving them the best possible start in their career and nurturing them to success. Eploy’s cloud-based recruitment software has streamlined our recruitment process to give candidates a seamless online experience from initial search to joining the team.''

Jonathan Simmons

Recruitment Manager

Leading the way

Prior to the creation of the Wren recruitment team, vacancies were advertised only on the careers site, with minimal access to job board searching, no ATS in place and a heavy reliance on agencies for recruitment. Wren has successfully turned this around to a model focused on direct recruitment using the Eploy platform. 

Wren’s recruitment team implemented Eploy’s cloud-based e-recruitment platform, candidate portal, hiring manager portal and onboarding portal to streamline their internal processes and make it easier for talent to apply for jobs and join the Wren family. Putting the candidate first is a priority, and Wren has achieved this through a seamless candidate experience at every stage when searching and applying for roles and finding out more about life at Wren.

Uncovering the recruitment challenges

Wren controls the full supply chain, so a large recruitment team consists of business partners recruiting within specific business areas encompassing Retail, Manufacturing, Engineering, H&S, Product Development, Security, Transport/Logistics, IT/Tech, Customer Service, Marketing, Installations and Trade. 

During the pandemic, Wren has depended on the internal recruitment function to source talent to fuel the company’s growth consistently. In addition,with homeowners using their time in lockdown to focus on home improvements, demand for Wren’s kitchens went to levels never seen before. 

Wren needed to recruit new employees to keep up with the demand and fill key vacancies with talented people quickly and efficiently. Recruitment challenges they needed to overcome included:

  • The need to recruit a high volume of new starters across all business areas with minimal agency spend.
  • Addressing a lack of talent in some business areas, for example, Tech/IT, and geographical pressures associated with scarcity of some talent segments in the Humber region through introducing an Apprenticeships and Early Careers strategy.
  • Improved efficiency across the recruitment process, especially around offer to acceptance.
  • Focusing on Diversity & Inclusion within the overall recruitment strategy.

Implementing a new way of working

Wren implemented Eploy’s complete ATS and Talent CRM with a full implementation service to align with how they wanted Eploy to work for the business. The team reviewed the needs of each business area and reflected the recruitment process from application to onboarding accordingly by creating and adapting workflows within Eploy. 

Eploy’s flexible workflows were designed for the candidate’s differing requirements and best experience and provide ongoing flexibility to make changes as the business needs. To address the specific challenges that Wren was experiencing, the team tackled this head-on using Eploy’s complete ATS and Talent CRM and award-winning fully customisable dashboards to:

  • Understand recruitment activity
  • Drill down on sources of where the best hires come from
  • Improve time to hire to mitigate losing candidates through the recruitment process
  • Improve the onboarding processes, aligning them to each business area
  • Understand careers site traffic 

As well as the self-service features you’d expect from a modern ATS, like intelligent, automated job alerts and interview scheduling, Wren required tools to nurture talent relationships and empower hiring managers with functionality for improved visibility and engagement.

Addressing the challenges

As well as the self-service features you’d expect from a modern ATS, like intelligent, automated job alerts and interview scheduling, Wren required tools to nurture talent relationships and empower hiring managers with functionality for improved visibility and engagement. 

"We are using Eploy’s ATS & e-recruitment platform, candidate, hiring manager and onboarding portals to make it easier for talent to apply for jobs and join the Wren family. In addition, we have built a talent pool of just over 150,000 candidates who have engaged with our brand”. Jonathan Simmons, Head of Recruitment Operations, Wren Kitchens

The talent pooling features provide candidate relationship management for passive and active candidates. By nurturing and engaging with future talent, segmented and grouped into talent pools, Wren can send timely and relevant candidate communication to prospective future hires.

Continue Reading.....

To continue reading the rest of this case study and the results achieved including 99% offer acceptance rate and 96% of hires sourced directly, download the full case study.

Learn more about the careers at Wren Kitchens.