Wren Kitchens, the UK’s No.1 kitchen retailer, is a passionate family-owned British manufacturer and retailer of fitted kitchens. Since their launch in 2009, their goal has been to be number one
in all aspects of their business and the markets they operate, relentlessly pursuing excellence and growth. They have 8,500 employees in both UK and USA, having scaled from c2500 UK employees in July 2017 when Jonathan Simmons joined as Head of Recruitment Operations to create and build a recruitment model and team.
Recruitment has ramped up due to the success of the business and its US expansion. Further growth is also on the horizon.
Supporting Wren’s goal to pursue growth is the need for passionate, talented people to join their team, so managing recruitment effectively across the company is vital.
Leading the way
Prior to the creation of the Wren recruitment team, vacancies were advertised only on the careers site, with minimal access to job board searching, no ATS in place and a heavy reliance on agencies for recruitment. Wren has successfully turned this around to a model focused on direct recruitment using the Eploy platform.
Wren’s recruitment team implemented Eploy’s cloud-based e-recruitment platform, candidate portal, hiring manager portal and onboarding portal to streamline their internal processes and make it easier for talent to apply for jobs and join the Wren family. Putting the candidate first is a priority, and Wren has achieved this through a seamless candidate experience at every stage when searching and applying for roles and finding out more about life at Wren.
Uncovering the recruitment challenges
Wren controls the full supply chain, so a large recruitment team consists of business partners recruiting within specific business areas encompassing Retail, Manufacturing, Engineering, H&S, Product Development, Security, Transport/Logistics, IT/Tech, Customer Service, Marketing, Installations and Trade.
During the pandemic, Wren has depended on the internal recruitment function to source talent to fuel the company’s growth consistently. In addition,with homeowners using their time in lockdown to focus on home improvements, demand for Wren’s kitchens went to levels never seen before.
Wren needed to recruit new employees to keep up with the demand and fill key vacancies with talented people quickly and efficiently. Recruitment challenges they needed to overcome included:
• The need to recruit a high volume of new starters across all business areas with minimal agency spend.
• Addressing a lack of talent in some business areas, for example, Tech/IT, and geographical pressures associated with scarcity of some talent segments in the Humber region through introducing an Apprenticeships and Early Careers strategy.
• Improved efficiency across the recruitment process, especially around offer to acceptance.
• Focusing on Diversity & Inclusion within the overall recruitment strategy.
Implementing a new way of working
Wren implemented Eploy’s complete ATS and Talent CRM with a full implementation service to align with how they wanted Eploy to work for the business. The team reviewed the needs of each business area and reflected the recruitment process from application to onboarding accordingly by creating and adapting workflows within Eploy.
Eploy’s flexible workflows were designed for the candidate’s differing requirements and best experience and provide ongoing flexibility to make changes as the business needs. To address the specific challenges that Wren was experiencing, the team tackled this head-on using Eploy’s complete ATS and Talent CRM and award-winning fully customisable dashboards to:
• Understand recruitment activity
• Drill down on sources of where the best hires come from
• Improve time to hire to mitigate losing candidates through the recruitment process
• Improve the onboarding processes, aligning them to each business area
• Understand careers site traffic
As well as the self-service features you’d expect from a modern ATS, like intelligent, automated job alerts and interview scheduling, Wren required tools to nurture talent relationships and empower hiring managers with functionality for improved visibility and engagement.
Addressing the challenges
As well as the self-service features you’d expect from a modern ATS, like intelligent, automated job alerts and interview scheduling, Wren required tools to nurture talent relationships and empower hiring managers with functionality for improved visibility and engagement.
"We are using Eploy’s ATS & e-recruitment platform, candidate, hiring manager and onboarding portals to make it easier for talent to apply for jobs and join the Wren family. In addition, we have built a talent pool of just over 150,000 candidates who have engaged with our brand”. Jonathan Simmons, Head of Recruitment Operations, Wren Kitchens
The talent pooling features provide candidate relationship management for passive and active candidates. By nurturing and engaging with future talent, segmented and grouped into talent pools, Wren can send timely and relevant candidate communication to prospective future hires.
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