Royal Papworth NHS Foundation Trust
Royal Papworth NHS Foundation Trust is one of the UK’s leading specialist cardiothoracic hospitals, providing advanced heart and lung services, including transplantation, cardiac surgery, and respiratory medicine. As a centre of clinical excellence and innovation, the Trust relies on a highly skilled, multidisciplinary workforce to deliver safe and effective care.
Industry
National Health Service
Main Challenges
High Vacancy Rate
Key Benefit
Reduction in Vacancies
Royal Papworth NHS Foundation Trust has Embedded Fairer and Faster Recruitment!
The Challenge
Despite its national reputation for clinical excellence, Royal Papworth NHS Foundation Trust faced persistent recruitment and retention challenges by early 2023. Staffing gaps were particularly acute in nursing and healthcare support worker (HCSW) roles, placing pressure on clinical teams and increasing reliance on temporary staffing.
Structural and regional factors, including the high cost of living and a decline in applications from newly qualified nurses, compounded the Trust’s recruitment challenges. These external pressures were exacerbated by an internal, manually-intensive recruitment system that hindered effective tracking and early candidate engagement.
Lack of real-time data made recruitment reactive, obscuring time-to-hire, candidate withdrawals, and recruitment bottlenecks. This limited manager visibility and led to candidate disengagement due to long silences between application stages.
The Solution
The Trust undertook a competitive tender process, evaluating multiple providers including NHS Jobs, a market-leading ATS vendor, and Oleeo. The selection criteria included:
- Cost-effectiveness
- Technological capability
- Customisability
- Potential for long-term partnership
Oleeo was selected in June 2023 as the preferred supplier, based on its comprehensive functionality, strong value proposition, and capacity to support a modern, data-driven recruitment strategy. Oleeo’s platform offered significant advantages over previous systems:
- The ability to build and manage talent banks
- A customer relationship management (CRM) engine to personalise candidate engagement
- Real-time recruitment dashboards
- High degree of configurability to meet the Trust’s specific needs
- Standardised decision-making tools
- Enhanced candidate communication
The Implementation Process
Throughout the implementation, emphasis was placed nurturing the partnership. Weekly meetings, feedback loops, and shared development goals enabled continuous adaptation and responsiveness. Where challenges emerged, such as in pre-employment check workflows, these were jointly addressed through escalation, dedicated working groups, and resource reallocation.
The Trust’s willingness to engage in system improvement, alongside Oleeo’s openness to feedback, helped shape not just local success but broader improvements for NHS users across the supplier’s client base.
The result was a recruitment infrastructure that was not only more efficient, but better aligned to organisational values and workforce priorities, capable of supporting data-driven decision-making, improved candidate experience, and long-term workforce sustainability.
The Results
Royal Papworth has seen demonstrable improvements across a range of recruitment performance indicators. These outcomes reflect not only operational gains, but also a shift in culture toward more transparent, data-driven, and candidate-focused practices. As of March 2025:
- Nursing vacancy rates have decreased from 13.79% to 1.77%
- HCSW vacancies have dropped from 26.82% to 11.01%
- The overall Trust vacancy rate has fallen from 14.33% to 6.01%
The new system has significantly improved service continuity and reduced reliance on agency staffing, positively impacting patient care and staff morale. Time-to-hire has decreased from 40-60 days to consistently meet the 48-day KPI, with the system now identifying exceptional cases for targeted improvements.
From June 2023 to March 2025, 127 candidate withdrawals were recorded, with 46.5% due to loss of interest, leading to improved candidate communications and onboarding content. During the same period, 79.4% of 726 candidates rated their recruitment experience as “Excellent” or “Very Good.” Manager engagement has also increased due to real-time visibility into candidate progress.
The partnership with Oleeo has supported new onboarding tools and early engagement features to reduce attrition. Crucially, the new ATS has enabled better EDI data analysis. It revealed that while a high proportion of Black and minority ethnic (BME) candidates applied, fewer were being shortlisted. In response, targeted support materials, including application and interview guides, were developed, improving candidate confidence and leading to more equitable shortlisting outcomes. These results highlight the value of digital transformation, strong supplier collaboration, and inclusive recruitment practices for modernizing NHS recruitment and improving workforce stability.
Lessons Learned & Implications
The success of the recruitment transformation at Royal Papworth NHS Foundation Trust highlights several key lessons for NHS organisations seeking to modernise workforce strategies and reduce vacancy rates.
The importance of partnership working cannot be understated. Working with a supplier that aligned with the Trust’s values and demonstrated a genuine commitment to co-design was critical. The ability to adapt the system to local needs, coupled with responsive support and shared problem-solving, created a platform for sustainable change.
The richness of data has driven improvement. The introduction of a system capable of tracking real-time metrics, from time-to-hire to candidate withdrawals and EDI outcomes, shifted recruitment from a reactive process to a strategic function. This visibility enabled targeted interventions, more effective decision-making, and a stronger focus on equity and experience.
Cultural change as much as technology drove success. While the technical infrastructure was essential, the increased engagement across the organisation pushed the transformation. Hiring managers gained ownership of the process, candidates reported improved experiences, and recruitment is being reframed as a shared responsibility rather than a back-office function.
Finally, values-based recruitment can be strengthened by the right digital tools. With greater transparency, structured decision-making, and proactive candidate engagement, the Trust was able to move toward a more inclusive and fair recruitment process – one that both reflects and reinforces its commitment to equity.
The results achieved at Royal Papworth demonstrate what is possible when digital innovation is combined with strategic intent and collaborative implementation. As NHS organisations continue to face workforce pressures, this case study offers a practical
“The transformation of Royal Papworth’s recruitment approach has delivered measurable improvements in vacancy rates, candidate experience, and process efficiency. More than a technological upgrade, the implementation of a modern ATS enabled a fundamental cultural shift toward more transparent, inclusive, and values-led recruitment practices.”
Luke Bage
Head of Resourcing, Royal Papworth NHS Foundation Trust