Selwood

With a pedigree spanning seven decades, Selwood today is an innovative business with a cutting-edge approach to customer service, product development, manufacture and quality.

They are world leaders in pump manufacturing, the leading pump rental solutions company in the UK and a renowned supplier of plant and construction equipment for hire and sale.

Keri Tunkara joined the business as Recruitment Manager and led the project. At the time there was no dedicated recruiter and recruitment was handled locally in branches. Handling CV’s and recruitment via email was unmanageable, no longer fit for purpose and they needed to up their game. Selwood wanted to build a brand and candidate experience that would have buy in across the organisation; HR Managers, Exec Team and Hiring Managers that impacted a positive recruitment experience.

Recruitment challenges

The challenges they faced were:

• The recruitment process was manual and paper based. To raise a job requisition would involve multi-level physical approval and paper chasing across the business.      

• The candidate experience varied across the process. This would be an opportunity to rethink the candidate experience and the process required to support it. Candidate correspondence needed to be improved and contracts issued in a timely manner to prevent losing candidates at this stage.  

• The market was competitive and tough. The nature of the business requires certain levels of qualifications and experience which made pinpointing talent and building a wider candidate pool hard.

• There was a lack of company values communicated in the recruitment process. Having the opportunity to build these key messages to target candidates in the market was key.

• There was a lack of shareable management information and complete insight into recruitment activity and candidate engagement. Having the ability to evidence efficiency and build understanding to the wider business was required.  

Strategy for success

The recruitment strategy had to provide structure to the business and a consistent candidate experience. How this was delivered would be through a formalised process supported by technology and evaluating the options to support the strategy. There was an opportunity to use the existing Selwood HR system that had basic recruitment capabilities, but limited features to address the issues and group growth aspirations. This was reviewed against current and future business need and it was deemed that the functionality required across the recruitment divisions/journey would need to include candidate relationship management and be able to map to the recruiting process.

Hiring takes place nationwide so managers would need access to a solution to enable them to see current tasks, vacancies and offers to manage candidates through the recruitment stages. Easing the pressure on hiring manger’s and having a consistent process that would position Selwood as a serious player in the market was imperative.

Addressing these issues presented a blank page to rethink the recruitment strategy, supported by the business, and that’s exactly what they did. In developing the recruitment strategy Selwood reviewed:

• What might be needed in the next 3 years and what solutions could support this.
• Would the solution help to attract and retain the best talent and address any skills shortages?
• How to communicate the employer brand and values across the candidate journey.
• If the solution could support social media integration, link to a careers website and be mobile responsive.

The Solution The ATS and E-recruitment solution that would need to support the requirements were evaluated against using the existing HR system and the possibility of making do with this tool set. Having mapped out the processes, and those involved in the process, they knew that they wanted more than an applicant tracking tool. Having candidate care as a priority, candidate relationship management capability and an understanding of the talent market to track all interactions and nurture talent was essential. 

It was decided a full recruitment platform from Eploy was best suited for Selwood. This combined a core system for the dedicated recruitment team and functionality through portals, specifically designed for hiring managers and candidates.      

The implementation began with a scoping exercise to really understand what Selwood were trying to achieve and challenge some of the thinking. This was used as an opportunity to build a thorough project plan, understand the communication flows and outline expectations. As part of the implementation, 80 hiring managers were bought in to the new way of working through a series of training sessions and 1:1’s so that they could fully understand the tool and capabilities that would be available to them.  

Following implementation, hiring managers could for the first time see relevant candidates with their active jobs including updating application status, creating interviews and all other stages. The big win was being able to set access as defined in the recruitment workflow to control how hiring managers worked with candidates and for hiring managers to see at-aglance candidate pipelines.

Keri Tunkara, Recruitment Manager at Selwood commented, “The feedback from hiring managers on the implementation and use of the system was overwhelming. There is always apprehension when a new system or process is introduced and how this is received. However, the responses were all positive e.g. ‘this is fabulous’ ‘we can react so quickly’. Getting everyone on board involved phone calls, Skype sessions, training on all types of devices – laptops, mobiles etc and training manuals to use the e-recruitment system in the best possible way.

“What we did wasn’t rocket science but a well thought out process with key stakeholders and candidates in mind that enabled us to react quickly and eradicate unnecessary paper chasing to do what it takes to bring the right new hires on board. Now we have a paperless requisition process, where jobs can be selected from a job library or created from scratch where approval is gained at the start of the process and checks built in throughout the process.

“This is a positive impact on our ability to be flexible and react when the business is awarded contracts, we can respond to filling vacancies quickly.” 

Success Tracking

The senior team at Selwood were open to new ideas and saw an opportunity to revolutionise the process – without paper forms.

“Eploy has strengthened internal stakeholder relationships due to the efficiencies the Resourcing department can provide. These include transparency of the approval process (accountabilities for individuals at all levels), speed of time to hire has been greatly reduced, visibility on the process and a smooth professional process for the candidate.

“Our industry historically has been to show up to the business and start the next day, but with structure and resourcing control we have shaped a professional approach to our candidates regardless of the role. We aim to provide a professional but down to earth process that is all about the people - we never want to lose our family feel, even as we grow.

“Eploy has enabled us to raise the profile of resourcing within the business and the importance of its core function within the business. Dashboards and analytics are providing the data which can influence business decisions - whilst this may be standard practice for a lot of businesses, historically this wasn’t required within Selwood but reporting on real time activities has become a focal point for our Executive Team.

“Our brand and career opportunities now have a place on social media. Employee videos are utilised to show candidates what it’s really like working with us. These are used across LinkedIn, YouTube and our corporate site. Many candidates now come to us via referrals and LinkedIn.

“We have a transparent, efficient and accountable process that promotes a consistent approach to recruitment for hiring managers and candidates. We plan to extend the hiring manager portal, candidate portal and onboarding portal use to a further 70 employees who will become part of the Selwood Group through acquisition of Siltbuster.

“We continue to develop our resourcing offering, now moving into online onboarding. This is influencing how we work within the wider team of Human Resources and assisting us to move to digital files, offering candidates contracts digitally rather than sending out in the traditional way. We want to continually improve the candidate experience to reflect the strong privately-owned business that we are.”
Keri Tunkara, Recruitment Manager, Selwood