Checkatrade is one of the UK’s top online marketplaces for home improvements and repairs.
Its mission is to be the trusted foundation of every home by connecting people with trades and tools to make home improvements easy – because safe and happy homes matter most to them.
Checkatrade has 600 high-performing individuals working across the UK, with offices in Portsmouth and London.
Headcount is split approximately 50% in professional roles across technology, product, sales, data, marketing, and finance.
The other half of the business, operating in the call centre, requires high-volume frontline recruitment across customer services and call centre-based sales.
Approaching Recruitment Change
Talent acquisition is vital at Checkatrade, delivering a model that satisfies talent specialisms and high-volume transactional recruitment. The Talent Acquisition Team is responsible for identifying, attracting, and retaining the best talent to support the company’s ambitious growth plans and demand for talent. The headcount forecast for CY24 will see growth continuing, with circa 300 fills a year.
The team is passionate about getting the right people into the right roles, led by its company values – Be All In, Always Customer Obsessed,Get It Done, Be Bold, and Do The Right Thing.
The Recruitment Challenge
Before implementing Eploy’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS), Checkatrade had one in-house recruiter who managed recruitment manually, relying on recruitment agencies. The core objective in rethinking the recruitment model was to bring recruitment in-house with a team to deliver a full end-to-end automated recruitment service to the business.
Checkatrade partnered with Eploy to deliver an end-to-end recruitment platform to manage the hiring process and utilise self-service recruitment analytics to measure and report on recruitment metrics.
A partnership approach between the Eploy Project Team and Checkatrade defined the recruitment processes to build in the core Eploy platform. Checkatrade uses Eploy’s RESTful API to export new starter data from Eploy into their Dayforce HCM platform.
Results and Achievements
In 2023, Checkatrade made 384 permanent offers, an increase of 54% on the previous year, with a small in-house team of Talent Acquisition Specialists. They achieved this by harnessing Eploy’s recruitment automation capabilities and its recruitment data to become a data-driven function. The team’s approach is focused on being effective and delivering a great service internally and to candidates.
• Direct hiring is 87% of the total annual hires.
• Applications have increased by 150% compared to the prior year through a comprehensive channel strategy, content creation, and brand storytelling.
• Dedicated reporting across key business areas for different audiences using Eploy’s real-time MI dashboards.
• Utilisation of Eploy’s ATS built-in Ad-Tuner that looks at reading ease, sentence length, gender bias and question balance to check content against key engagement criteria. The team is targeted to achieve 80% optimisation, and as a result, the quantity and quality of applications have improved through gender-neutralising, adding to Checkatrade’s Diversity and Inclusion drive.
• Recruitment marketing accelerated to support candidate engagement and build the employer brand, developing content across all channels to engage audiences.
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