Secure Trust Banking Group is a wellestablished UK bank, having been incorporated in 1954. The group provides banking services, including a range of lending solutions and savings products. The group operates from its head office in Solihull, West Midlands and currently has approximately 950 employees across multiple UK sites.
At the heart of what Secure Trust Bank does is their strategy: Grow, Sustain and Love. Customers are central to the business, and their people are vital to delivering the plan.
Recruiting for a vast array of specialist and support roles across HR, Training, IT, Contact Centre, Compliance, Finance and Sales & Marketing, Secure Trust Bank were relying on numerous manual processes.
They wanted to engage with talent, showcase the company culture, what they have to offer and make their recruitment processes more efficient.
Recruitment challenges
Secure Trust Bank had an ATS in place that could not support their needs from a growth and compliance perspective. The system was not conducive to internal engagement and had no dedicated capabilities for hiring managers, resulting in their disengagement. Further, all offers and contracts were paper-based and had multi-levels of authorisation. Once contracts went back to HR, they had no visibility or process tracking, something they wanted to change. The bank undertook a review process to identify how best to re-launch the approach to recruitment and engage the best talent.
The recruitment team looked at what needed to change and mapped out the hiring workflow, then began a tender process for a new e-recruitment solution that could support their future needs.
Key deliverables were to have a strategy that would provide flexibility for recruiters, hiring managers and candidates. Automation improvements were needed, for example, to improve interview booking and mitigate the potential for candidates to ‘drop-off’ at the onboarding stage, where physical signatures and scans were required.
Another key deciding factor in the choice for a new ATS was that the chosen platform could help the bank meet the requirements of the GDPR and other compliance obligations. Also, the candidate experience and application process needed a thorough review. The group wanted to embed their values throughout the candidate journey and replace time-consuming, manual steps such as interview booking.
The Implementation Phase
The implementation process with Eploy allowed the team to design the hiring workflow with the candidate, hiring manager and company culture in mind. Eploy delivered dedicated portals that provide completely web-based access across the recruitment process, all aligned to the Secure Trust Bank brand.
It was important for the company values to be more than just words on a wall. Values were built into the proposition at every step. As part of the project, the Secure Trust Bank careers site was overhauled. Online recruitment shifted from a few jobs on the main website to its own careers area, rich with candidate-centric content.
Following the core Eploy system implementation, Secure Trust Bank extended candidate engagement through online onboarding. The onboarding functionality allows the group to request and collect appropriate new hire information and manage the offer acceptance online.
The team are now actively measuring recruitment performance through Eploy’s real-time dashboards and metrics, enabling them to monitor KPI’s and help hiring managers to plan their activities. Now, everyone can collaborate better as a team and see the impact of their work. Key reports include the volume of vacancies, number of screened candidates, sources of placement, time to hire, time to fill, effectiveness of application source and agency performance.
Results
The implementation of Eploy has massively improved the candidate experience through enhanced and relevant communication, a smoother process that engages with the candidate and faster time to hire.
After going live, Secure Trust Bank had a record-breaking month for recruitment with the number of vacancies filled doubling. They are now recruiting for 400+ roles per annum.
Through a dedicated careers area with 
candidatecentric content, combined with an end-to-end recruitment platform, Secure Trust Bank is now well placed to attract the right talent.
The agency portal provides clear ownership of candidates, reducing duplication and ensures a safer online experience and more reliable information security.
The data and recruitment visibility provided through customisable dashboards shows clear process tracking and visibility for hiring managers and recruitment teams alike.
Katie Drumm, Resourcing Manager at Secure Trust Bank commented “Having flexibility for our recruitment team, hiring managers and candidates has changed the way we work and engage with talent. We have embedded our culture through everything we do and enhanced both candidate and hiring manager engagement. Hiring manager engagement was crucial so we ensured communication around the project was about how the recruitment review would make hiring manager’s roles easier.
“We took time to revisit our recruitment process to add value at every stage of the recruitment process, keen to not transfer an old process into a new system. Having the functionality available to us we have achieved some key improvements. For example, candidates can now use the interview slot selector to select a convenient interview time. This has reduced administration and increased application to interview ratios for contact centre roles from 40% to 80%.
“The dashboards and analytics within Eploy provide a complete visualisation of tasks, activities and results. We know where to concentrate our recruitment efforts and can report in realtime on policy and compliance too.”
Chris Bogh CTO at Eploy added “Secure Trust Bank has embraced the new way of working and delivered an improved candidate experience and recruitment process for all involved, saving time and money. They are well placed to address future recruitment needs and are utilising Eploy’s extensive functionality to recruit smarter at every stage from raising job requisitions to onboarding.”