The journey so far...
Malmaison & Hotel du Vin Group (MHdV) have recruitment requirements across 33 hotels covering many departments within the business including Bar, Finance, Housekeeping, Kitchen, Reception and Restaurant.
Until recently Malmaison Hotel du Vin operated without an ATS/e-Recruitment CRM system; recruitment was handled by individual hotels and two HR Managers, a process which required consider-able time investment, offered no reporting capabilities to measure performance and overall provided a reactive approach to recruitment rather than proactive.
For a time, the Group was assisted by an RPO who supported on this. However, if a Hiring Manager was out of the office or unavailable, CV’s would mount up to unmanageable levels, lengthening the entire process and resulting in a poor candidate experience.
Malmaison Hotel du Vin knew that creating a positive candidate experience would lead to a smoother process and improved engagement.
Through the development of their recruitment strategy and careers site, Malmaison Hotel du Vin have been able to take control of their recruitment in a structured and measurable way that improves the candidate experience and reduces time to hire. The Group is already experiencing results, with a significant reduction in their permanent agency spend to date.
Driving the recruitment strategy across Malmaison Hotel du Vin is Ben Gabbitas, Group Head of Recruitment. Ben is an experienced recruitment professional with an extensive operational and recruitment background. In his role, Ben has utilised his previous experience to simplify recruitment processes to attract, engage and recruit candidates. His remit when he joined the Group was to revolutionise the recruitment process. Ben is currently recruiting to add capacity to his team, to ensure the Group remains proactive across their recruitment process.
Ben was instrumental in introducing the idea of an ATS and e-Recruitment CRM to aid the brands’ recruitment pressures and could share his experience of previous roles and suitable vendors.
As part of the evaluation, the Group was looking for a system to deliver the following:
• Functionality to enhance the candidate experience
• Adaptability to any specific requirements that might be required
Eploy was evaluated and selected as the best functional fit to deliver the Group’s recruitment strategy; in their words it ‘ticked all of the boxes’.
Attracting and engaging the right talent
The Group is at the start of their e-recruitment journey to improve customers’ experience with faster, smarter recruitment and already are making strides.
The revised career site is a central hub for candidates who can now search, apply and interact with the Eploy CRM from a smartphone, tablet or desktop.
Candidates can register, login and apply for roles using keywords, location and vacancy type, and simply upload their CV’s from their Google Drive, Dropbox or One Drive systems. Candidates don’t need to complete long registration forms because the system will intelligently match skills and experience to vacancies.
So far, Malmaison Hotel du Vin have embraced the dashboard and analytics reports to really understand the current status of performance across the recruitment cycle. They are now able to access and review the authorisation process, vacancies and applicants at each stage by brand and locations and equality measurement. They can now track sources, which pages of the careers site are working and which are not, and can amend their strategy to ensure a more targeted approach, resulting in saving in advertising costs. “We aim to increase the number of candidates coming direct to us via the website so it’s important to know what is working by measuring and monitoring” commented Ben Gabbitas, Group Head of Recruitment, MHDV.
They can now simultaneously publish vacancies to multiple platforms and job boards to accelerate distribution as well as track responses.
Developing the candidate journey
As part of their ongoing commitment to continually improving the candidate experience, the Group plans to review job requisitions to ensure all jobs are worded and raised correctly and introduce pre-screening questions to increase the efficiency of the process and the quality of the talent pool. The goal is to have the right talent in the right place at the right time.
The Group’s aim is to manage the entire job offer process online with Eploy from onboarding to automating the entire offer acceptance process. This will further improve
efficiency and build engagement with new hires before they start.
Ben Gabbitas said: “In implementing Eploy, we have saved time across the Group in our recruiting processes. Not having to rely on CV’s coming into an individual’s inbox is a huge step forward – as are the levels of MI and data we now have to measure progress. Our candidate journey is now firmly in place, and we’re pleased to have a platform on which we can improve as we continue to learn and support our recruitment needs”.
Commenting on the Malmaison Hotel du Vin’s recruitment journey, Chris Bogh, Eploy’s Chief Technology Officer said: “Finding and recruiting candidates who are the perfect fit across multiple locations with diverse roles is always going to be a challenge, so it was important we were able to make this as easy as possible in creating a positive candidate to help attract and engage the best candidates”.