B&M

B&M have 5 Distribution Centres (DC) located across the UK; these are the cogs that keep the wheels turning. Right stock, right time, right place is its mantra.

Time waits for no-one… so it’s all about maximum efficiency, in a safe environment that is designed to drive productivity. This is what B&M DC teams strive for! And with that, B&M had a desire to change and improve recruitment and onboarding for its Supply Chain arm of the business.

B&M achievements:

• Time Saving
• More Efficient Processes
• Improved engagement
• Improved retention rates
• Improved Quality of Hire
• Increased internal collaboration

Read the full case study here.

Evaluating Change

At its peak, the Supply Chain arm was recruiting up to 250 people a week. This presented an opportunity to improve the once manual process through automation and deliver improvements in key recruitment metrics, candidate experience and employee retention.

The changes began with recruitment process, because that’s where the issue stemmed from. The main problem was ineffectiveness of sourcing, evaluating and hiring the right people. Hiring was mainly in volume, through Sponsored Ads on a Job Board, without any evaluation of the success it delivered.

Subsequently, most candidates hired through the job board left soon after joining, resulting in a cycle that impacted the operation where people are critical to the supply chain – without them the operation would fall over. 

Changes were needed at the top of the recruitment process, all the way through to onboarding. The initiative was supported at senior level and up and down the business. 

The changes sought to break the cycle and optimise the £250,000 annual spend on Sponsored Job Board Ads, that fell short in delivering results.

Steps to Improve Recruitment at B&M

It wasn’t uncommon for applications to be submitted without a CV, making it hard to evaluate a candidate’s credentials, as well as putting pressure on time and resources internally for a consistent evaluation. 

Kickstarting the change process, Leeanne Gallagher, Head of People & Chloe Lavery, Recruitment Partner - Supply Chain, met with the Recruitment Team, HR Team and Onboarding Teams to understand what was happening and how many new joiners were being lost. Through the team’s best efforts, the process was completely broken. 

Analysis revealed the churn of employees, but no real recruitment data was being captured. As part of the turnaround, the team started capturing data to enable decision making for immediate improvements.

Using Eploy’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS), the Recruitment Team utilised the recruitment platform to build recruitment workflows and take control of the end-to-end recruitment process. 

Screening forms are built into the application process to assess and filter candidates automatically at the early stage of the hiring process. This was previously handled manually, where 6 team members were responsible for phoning each candidate to answer pre-screening questions or identify unsuitable candidates based on role requirements. This equated to 37.5 hours per person per week. After improvements of automated screening, these hours were no longer needed to perform manual pre-screening, so the team were re-deployed into different areas of the business. 

The screening forms capture details including location and how a candidate would travel to work. Data behind this revealed that many candidates travelled by bike. This data could be filtered by site, which revealed two key sites where transport was an issue.

“Having that insight meant we could consider opportunities to engage a wider network of candidates. For example, could we provide a bus to recruit more people from a particular area?”. Chloe Lavery, Recruitment Partner - Supply Chain, B&M

Chloe and the team reviewed the application process and the Indeed spend (£250,000 per annum). They created a sponsored vs organic application conversion, looking at how many candidates they were losing at each stage for organic and sponsored employees. The results were similar, so this allowed the gradual reduction of spend on Sponsored Ads.

There was some reluctance internally that asking for a CV would deter people from applying. Based on the conversion report, the team started asking for a CV as part of the application process that is parsed in Eploy. This is having a positive impact on applications received and diminished any fears that asking a candidate to upload a CV would deter people from applying.

Eploy’s Candidate Portal is designed to convert visitors to candidates with efficient applications, automatically extracting all key information into the candidate’s profile. Candidates can access a secure candidate area to view and manage applications. The candidate portal is seamlessly integrated into the B&M careers site to promote the B&M brand consistently.

Eploy’s Onboarding Module is part of Eploy ATS, and it was a tool kit the team aspired to implement. Having addressed the recruitment issue of quality of hire, the team were able to utilise the onboarding module to focus on onboarding improvements. Again, recruitment data in Eploy was key to driving change.

New starter forms at B&M are plentiful, and the process was previously manual, often taking hours to complete. Form filling formed part of the induction process on a new joiners first day, which was far from ideal and not the experience B&M wanted for new recruits. Automating onboarding has allowed new hire information to be completed compliantly online ahead of ‘day-one’. The integration of Eploy with I-Trent seamlessly exports new hire information to payroll, which has reduced administration and improved data collection.

New starter references for managers are also requested and collected within the onboarding module. This has had a positive impact, reducing HR Teams workload.

“After just one month, we’re already seeing the results from automating onboarding. New hires have completed everything online before. Day one with us is now focussed on engaging with new hires, not form filling. We are embedding the values of B&M, sharing the opportunities we can offer and getting new joiners ready for their first day in the role. It is a more engaging experience.

“We have also built into the onboarding and induction process a message from our Supply Chain Director to welcome everyone onboard.” Leeanne Gallagher, Head of HR - B&M

The Recruitment Dashboards in Eploy provide unlimited self-service dashboards. Dashboards are customisable to measure the recruitment metrics that matter to the teams with full visibility of the most recent Recruitment Analytics.

Results

• From Sponsored Job Ads, where B&M were losing every single candidate, to now, where Sponsored Job Ads are not used at all. Data was key to this decision making process. 
• Recruitment is fine-tuned to hire more ‘right first time’ hires.
• Quality of hire has improved. 
• Absence has improved by 47%.
• Employee churn has improved by 50%. 
• Each site Onboarder now has the autonomy, process and tools to manage recruitment and onboarding. This has positively improved the high levels of turnover.

“Using the recruitment data available to us in Eploy, we started to understand our hiring status, sourcing channels success and impact, patterns on people leaving, and what could be done to mitigate the risks and improve the recruitment process”. Chloe Lavery, Recruitment Partner - Supply Chain, B&M

Download the full case study here.