CASE STUDY
Helping Marks & Spencer Transform the Recruitment Experience.
Marks & Spencer recruitment needed an application system that could handle the high volumes of applications to roles across the UK to help it be able to offer exceptional customer service to the 33 million plus customers that come through its doors and over 6.1 million people that log-on to its website every single week. Typically customer assistant vacancies alone were creating between 35 and 40,000 vacancies per year largely during the seasonal peaks of Easter, summer and Christmas. In total, the store was receiving at least 200,000 applications for this single role across the UK.
Industry
Retail
Main challenges
High volume recruitment
Key benefit
Reduced time to hire
M&S is one of the UK’s leading retailers, with 1,382 stores worldwide
M&S needed an application system that could handle the high volumes of applications to roles across the UK to help it be able to offer exceptional customer service to the 33 million plus customers that come through its doors and over 6.1 million people that log-on to its website every single week.
“Oleeo offers us a very lean and efficient twotouch process to volume recruitment. We can limit the number of applications from applicants to just one to avoid duplication and store conflicts compliant to business rules. That gives us a typical time to hire of three days at best, variable across the country.”
Marks & Spencer needed a brand new system that would…
- Handle the high volumes of applications to roles across the UK
- Offer exceptional customer service
Why Oleeo and what was the implementation like?
The Oleeo Intuitive Talent Acquisition Platform helps the M&S recruitment team and shared services team handle the hundreds of thousands of applications it receives across the whole organisation. The system, with technology from Oleeo partners integrated within it, affords the organisation more consistency in the recruitment process and better candidate selection in a simple two-step process that takes applicants all the way from application to on-boarding. The technology that Oleeo’s Intuitive Talent Acquisition Platform consists of allows M&S to manage the entire recruitment process and significantly reduce the time to hire without jeopardising quality. It allows an organisation to post one vacancy instead of 50 for a single post using bulk processing.
The scoring system offers us responds to thousands of data points in our application processes to identify the strongest predictors of success. It means that we are able to improve the quality of candidates going through to assessment centres by between 5 and 16%.
“Oleeo offers us a very lean and efficient twotouch process to volume recruitment. We can limit the number of applications from applicants to just one to avoid duplication and store conflicts compliant to business rules. That gives us a typical time to hire of three days at best, variable across the country.”
Results
- Store conflict application controls- M&S can now ensure candidates only make 1 application per role avoiding store conflict
- Duplicate checking- Duplicate checking occurs at the application stage using business rules.
- 1 hour turnaround- At its fastest, applicants can be contacted within 1 hour from application to booking an interview.
- Significantly faster time to hire- Time to hire typically now significantly faster to as little as 3 days
- Increased conversions- Greater conversion through robust testing and application flow.
- Uninterrupted application flow- There is no break in application flow.
Recruitment time savings
Improvement in candidate quality
The Future
This is just the start for us. We will continue to evolve Oleeo’s algorithms to make them more robust. We are now beginning to add post-hire performance data into the system. This will help us to ensure continuous improvement in data-driven recruitment selection and also employee retention.
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