Mobile phone giant the Carphone Warehouse requires top quality talent to maintain its market position and in order to attract the best staff it decided to move its recruitment online; find out what happened.

The challenge:
Carphone Warehouse aims to treat potential candidates with the same commitment to excellence as it provides its external customers. This makes a streamlined recruitment process essential to ensure candidates are dealt with efficiently and quickly.

Carphone Warehouse used to manage recruitment using paper and email applications. This was slow, and the company found that it could not get back to candidates quickly enough. It also had no view of service level agreements or the length of the employment process.

“With records kept on spreadsheets we felt our recruitment system was outdated, and with around 1000 CVs per month coming in for the retail division alone, processing applications efficiently was a real challenge,” explained Pete Feldman, Head of HR Shared Services at the Carphone Warehouse.

“The administration involved was also very time consuming and took up a lot of the HR team’s time. Valuable time was being spent on paper pushing rather than focusing on strategic issues.”

If candidates were to be treated in the same way as customers, a review of the company’s sourcing process was critical. The candidate experience needed to be improved at every stage from the moment a potential employee sent in a CV right through to the interview stage. The company also wanted to make it easier to apply for vacancies and ensure job descriptions were visible on its website.

The solution:
To achieve these objectives, the company moved its recruitment online. A review of the key e-recruitment solutions on the market led to the decision to implement Jobpartners’ ActiveRecruiter. This system has been designed to manage the entire recruitment process and support internal mobility.

Following a smooth implementation process, the system was initiated in the UK. The HR team now uses this to manage the recruitment process and source for positions across the company.

Benefits:
By moving recruitment online, the Carphone Warehouse has greatly improved the management and efficiency of its recruitment process.

“Our recruitment cycle is now much slicker and more consistent across the company,” said Ian Boyton, the company’s Recruitment Marketing Manager.

“Applying for a job at Carphone Warehouse is much quicker and easier than before. We are able to respond to candidates very quickly and have an automated response system in place.

“This has helped to enhance our employer brand and ensure we treat potential employees with the same emphasis on excellence that we commit to customers. This can only help us to attract and retain the best talent in the industry.”

The programme enables internal candidates to create their own profiles and notifies them of new positions matching their criteria. They can also search for positions based on their criteria, apply for multiple positions and monitor the progress of their applications online. In addition, Carphone Warehouse’s HR can perform searches for internal candidates who best match the profiles of vacant positions.

The system’s candidate gateway has been designed in such a way as to ensure maximum accessibility, even from simple store terminals. This means retail employees are able to search and apply for jobs when they have a few minutes to spare whilst in-store.

According to Ian: “Encouraging internal mobility is very important for nurturing and retaining employees. “ActiveRecruiter helps our employees to be proactive about their career with Carphone Warehouse and has made it much easier for them to apply for a job. It is also much easier for HR to identify suitable internal talent.

“With improved visibility on the internet we have a wider presence on the market. We also have quicker access to the web community which means responses to vacancies are faster.”

This strategy has also enabled Carphone Warehouse to reduce its reliance on recruitment agencies and increase the efficiency of dealing with the agencies it still works with.

“Our experience to date with e-recruitment has been very positive. And the great support Jobpartners has provided coupled with its commitment to research and development and bringing out new, innovative versions of ActiveRecruiter means we will continue to use the tool.”