Gateley Plc

Over the past two decades, Gateley has grown significantly through strategic acquisitions, innovation, and ongoing investment in its people and services. With a team of around 1,600 people, Gateley continues to evolve, and its recruitment approach is built to flex and respond to the needs of a growing and ambitious business.

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Attracting high-quality talent efficiently and cost-effectively

Gateley wanted to unlock the power of connections in sourcing top talent through employee referrals. Having previously had an employee referrals scheme that originated from its traditional law firm roots, it was evident that through company growth, the organisation required a restructuring of the scheme to be fit for purpose, group-wide.

Gateley operates in a skilled, candidate-short market and has traditionally relied on agencies, with a 50/50 split of direct and agency sourcing. The reliance on agencies has caused the cost of hire to soar. The Resourcing Team wanted to find a way to attract more people directly and reduce the reliance on agency sourcing. A solution was required to leverage the existing workforce to attract high-quality talent efficiently and cost-effectively by encouraging employee participation in the recruitment process.

Employee referrals were originally an HR led, fully manual process, which was disjointed and open to inefficiencies and human error. Some businesses within the Group hadn’t yet embraced the employee referral scheme, and it was crucial that a new solution could evolve with the fast-growing company. An internal review discovered that multiple schemes were applied across the acquired businesses. This resulted in low visibility of the employee referral schemes, with employees unsure of how best to interact with them, thereby limiting employee engagement. Leading the delivery of the organisation’s recruitment strategy, Chris Lake, Head of Recruitment at Gateley, is responsible for ensuring recruitment aligns with the delivery of integrated legal and complementary business services across its five market-facing Platforms.

Chris Lake, Head of Recruitment at Gateley Plc shared, ‘’The biggest issue with Employee Referral schemes isn’t the engagement, but having a portal that’s easy for employees to use – then engagement is intuitive.”

An ATS with an Employee Referrals Portal

Gateley implemented Eploy’s recruitment platform, which combines an Applicant Tracking System, Recruitment CRM, Employee Referrals, Onboarding, and Analytics. The ATS platform is integrated seamlessly with the careers site to provide an excellent candidate experience. The Recruitment Team configured a seamless, automated authorisation and recruitment process using Eploy and created a fresh, motivating careers website that highlights the range of careers at Gateley.

Having embedded the optimised recruitment process and streamlined hiring workflows, the Recruitment Team worked to enhance its sourcing strategy using Eploy’s Employee Portal. The programme would help balance out the high percentage of agency-sourced talent, while also creating a way to engage employees.

The portal is an extension of Eploy’s ATS platform that empowers employees to view vacancies effortlessly, refer candidates via email, social networks, WhatsApp, and QR codes, and earn points for their activities. Points can then be redeemed for rewards and bonuses for new hires.

This revised approach to employee referrals is beneficial to both the Resourcing Team, who can tap into reliable employee networks, and Gateley employees, who can now participate and be financially rewarded for their engagement.

“No other ATS provider, other than Eploy, offers a referrals module within its recruitment platform.’’ Chris Lake, Head of Recruitment at Gateley

Employee Referrals Reimagined

Gateley designed a simple group-wide scheme aligned with their internal ‘Job Family’ structure, ranging from the most senior roles to apprentice-level roles. The latter were excluded from the programme, due to a high volume of graduate-level candidates already applying for roles at the organisation.

A standardised policy was established to define eligibility criteria for participation in the Employee Referrals programme. This policy outlines the rewards, which vary based on the Job Family Level, and are granted to the referring employee once the referred candidate completes their probation period. To promote transparency, the reward levels are visible to all employees across the business.

Following competitor benchmarking and a comparison of agency fees with projected referral costs, Employee Referral Programme rewards were set at roughly one-fifth of what an agency hire would have cost the organisation.

To keep it in line with Gateley’s Employer Brand, the employee referrals scheme is called ‘Refer.’ The programme is fully branded to create a seamless journey for Gateley’s employees, who can easily access the Employee Portal.

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Utilising Employee Networks

While most organisations don’t include senior stakeholders and HR teams to participate in Employee Referrals programmes, Gateley decided to take a different approach. As most Partners and Directors have an extensive network of people, it was an untapped opportunity to source quality, skilled candidates.

To ensure a fair process, Senior Stakeholders and HR Team members are only eligible to refer candidates if it’s for vacancies in a different part of the business. If they have any direct or indirect involvement in the part of the business or an influence on the hiring process, they would be disqualified from the referrals programme.

The only team not eligible to participate in the ‘Refer’ programme is the Talent Acquisition team, due to their direct involvement in sourcing talent for the whole organisation.

Programme Roll-Out

To make sure all teams across Gateley are aware of the ‘Refer’ programme, the Talent Acquisition team collaborated with the Marketing and Communications team, spreading the word on how employees can participate in the hiring process across the organisation. The promotion had to be attractive from an EVP perspective to be seen as a benefit rather than ‘yet another task’.

One of the ways the programme was embedded was by utilising different screens across the office areas to share the news. The screens could be managed from a central location, ensuring that no matter which part of the UK the office is based in, the employees receive messaging that’s relevant to them and their department.

The Talent Acquisition team needed to be available to train employees to utilise the Employee Referrals programme. Whilst it was a straightforward process and a vast improvement over the previous Employee Referrals process, part of the roll-out included supporting employees who might need additional assistance to become familiar with the Employee Referrals module. This was achieved through video tutorials, as well as spending time to educate employees on how the portal works and the benefits of engagement.

The Results

Using Eploy’s Employee Portal, the refreshed Employee Referrals program, ‘Refer’, has brought Gateley a wealth of positive results:

• An automated programme with the power to tailor to business needs.
• Commercial benefits, driving down cost per hire and reducing reliance on other sourcing channels.
• Accelerated time to hire through faster timelines of employee referrals.
• Cost-effective hiring through reducing recruitment/agency costs through effective use of employee referrals as a sourcing channel.
• A simple, easy-to-use system used group-wide that has boosted employee engagement.
• A flexible and scalable programme to adapt to significant business growth without a redesign of the programme.
• The scheme works across all role levels including senior level hires, however excludes apprenticeship and graduate candidates and recruitment processes.
• Employee engagement and employee referrals usage have increased significantly. Immediately after implementing ‘Refer’, with one dedicated programme, 18 successful referrals were received within the first 12 months of implementation.
• 10-15% of candidates are hired each year through Eploy’s Employee Referrals portal, with the strategy in place to increase this within the next 3 years.
• Tracking key information such as who referred, when and which stage of the referral process the candidate is in.
• Significant time savings through Eploy’s Candidate Portal, removing the back-and-forth communication between the Resourcing Team and employees.
• Single sign-on through Eploy with SCIM user provisioning.
• Eploy’s dashboards provide one central place for data and reporting with visibility of recruitment activity across all business areas. Fact-based data, such as cost per channel and referral activity, is easily tracked to identify untapped opportunities and key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Employee Retention rates for referred candidates are exceptionally high. Gateley are seeing that referred candidates have a 100% retention rate for their first 12 months in the business.

* Eploy Referrals is an optional module that fully integrates with the core Eploy Platform. Bonuses and rewards can be created and tracked within the platform however fulfilment of any bonuses and rewards must be managed by the customer.

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