With ten sites spanning eight locations across Somerset, Devon and London there is quite a broad range of roles on offer at Yeo Valley, from Finance, Marketing and Procurement to Dairy
Operations and Engineering.
With a diverse range of roles, a strong set of values and some great perks, it became ever more important that the candidate experience and strong brand was at the forefront of the careers site.
The Recruitment Challenge
Before working with Eploy to implement a complete recruitment platform, the Yeo Valley recruitment process and candidate experience was disjointed and siloed. There was very little visibility of the end-to-end journey, internal and external candidates, or KPI reporting. Recruitment activity was, in the main, reliant on using a job posting tool to advertise vacancies.
Further, the company’s recruitment process required a lot of manual intervention, hiring managers weren’t engaged, and there was a lack of flexibility. Yeo Valley had recently appointed a new Recruitment Specialist, one of their first tasks was to carry out a full review of the company’s hiring strategy. The review identified the primary recruitment challenges as:
• Limited reliable or valid recruitment data.
• No Key Performance Indicators or Service Level Agreements in place.
• No specific recruitment skills training provided.
• No governance framework in place.
• Limited tools and guidance for hiring managers on best practice selection.
• Heavy reliance on using agencies to fill vacancies.
• Little understanding of how to recruit the right people.
• Lack of visibility for hiring managers of the process from vacancy requisition to candidate onboarding.
There was a desire to move toward a direct sourcing model, with better business Management Information that would enable a smarter, more efficient way of working to support an improved candidate experience and improved end-to-end process.
Yeo Valley’s Approach
It was apparent that to underpin all aspects of Yeo Valley’s modernised recruitment processes, they would need the right technology. The company wanted to improve the candidate experience, ensuring that it reflected what it is like to work at Yeo Valley, demonstrating their Employer Brand Value.
Following a thorough review of the market, Yeo Valley selected Eploy’s complete recruitment platform to deliver a robust end-to-end recruitment process that provides a stellar candidate experience that attracts and engages the right talent at the right time, on any device.
Also, Yeo Valley wanted to fully integrate the recruitment platform with a new careers website that reflected the employer brand to help attract the best talent and immerse them in the Yeo Valley culture, and make the process of finding and applying for roles simple.
The Implementation Process
Eploy provided a full implementation service, beginning with the ‘Customer Readiness’ phase where they gathered all of Yeo Valleys requirements. The Yeo Valley team were able to 
consider precisely how they wanted Eploy to work for their business. A partnership approach between the Eploy Project Team and Yeo Valley provided the complete system build requirements. Internal stakeholders were also involved and consulted to help define and shape the processes.
Collectively, Eploy & Yeo Valley were able to:
• Define and create suitable vacancy templates for available roles.
• Agree and implement the vacancy requisition and approval processes.
• Build the right screening forms for candidate applications and assessments.
• Set up multiple hiring workflows based on recruitment team and hiring managers roles.
• Implement an online onboarding process with customised new starter information and automated reference collection.
• Ensure all of the new processes would deliver an improved candidate experience with personalised engagement throughout.
Results
The core Eploy system supports proactive recruitment through talent pooling, that nurtures talent through the powerful search and segmentation tools and email & SMS marketing.
The new careers website provides a smooth candidate experience that embraces the brand principles to showcase the company story and ‘what it’s like working at Yeo’. Eploy’s candidate portal has been seamlessly integrated into the website to provide an onbrand, intuitive application and registration process to convert visitors to candidates.
Candidates visiting the careers site can find, search and apply for relevant roles and manage their application on any device. Candidates can also register for job alerts in their chosen area and login to the candidate portal using their preferred social network profiles.
It’s not just candidates receiving an improved experience, throughout the business recruiters and hiring managers to work collaboratively with a transparent view of the recruitment journey to manage performance, timescales and costs far more effectively.
Sam Ford, Talent Attraction Manager at Yeo Valley, said “We now have a solid foundation on which to continually build our recruitment journey to find passionate people to join our family. Already candidates have provided great feedback on the look and feel of the changes we have made.”
The project has transformed the way Yeo Valley manage their recruitment. The team can now:
• Accurately capture critical recruitment data.
• Report on KPI’s and SLA’s around time to hire (TTH), percentage direct and other key metrics. • Provide their people manager population with recruitment specific training.
• Work within a governance framework facilitated by consistent use of the Eploy system.
• Provide tools and guidance for hiring managers on best practice selection methods.
Since implementing Eploy, Yeo Valley is now operating at over 80% direct sourcing, resulting in substantial cost savings through reduced agency spend.
Chris Bogh, CTO at Eploy commented “Yeo Valley understood the importance of candidate experience and how to utilise their brand to strengthen the recruitment strategy. Their career site provides candidate-centric content aligned with the target audience and roles fully integrated into the core Eploy platform. Sam and the team at Yeo Valley provides a great customer example of how Eploy can transform your recruitment efforts, particularly where you need to engage with multiple audiences in mind to attract, recruit and onboard your perfect teams.”
https://careers.yeovalley.co.uk/