It’s been announced that members of our HR team have been nominated for Best In-House Recruitment Team at the Recruiter Awards 2024. It recognises their hard work in the last year to recruit 600 new frontline engineers alongside our business-as-usual recruitment. In total, 850 people joined us in the last year.
The team were responsible for creating intake plans with each of our regions, ensuring training was in place to meet our timelines, and running a taskforce with different departments across the business to effectively onboard our new starters.
They also launched various nationwide campaigns to attract a diverse range of candidates by using assessment centres and recruitment days to drive bulk numbers through the door, while still ensuring we were providing a positive candidate experience. Assessment centres involved interviews, group exercises, written tests, and practical elements, giving candidates lots of opportunities to demonstrate their strengths. Candidates had the opportunity to meet engineers, see their vans and equipment, view the depots they would be working in, and meet management, so they could get excited about the prospect of joining us and feel confident it was the right job for them.
With an aim to build a diverse and inclusive workplace, the team actively looked for candidates from underrepresented groups and implemented inclusive hiring practices such as anonymous CV applications and CV-less hiring. They also engaged with external community programmes, schools and charities that support underrepresented groups. All hiring decisions were made by a diverse panel of colleagues to reduce bias in the decision-making process.
Their hard work has paid off and the team managed to fill a lot of the roles ahead of schedule. They were also able to make substantial improvements to our onboarding process, such as streamlining the ordering of equipment, PPE and vans, and introducing a better induction day – delivered by our own team to make sure everyone felt welcome and reassured that they had support in their first few weeks.
Raj Ghai, Head of Resourcing and EDI, said: “I am incredibly proud of how we have built a team that has successfully delivered such a huge project with a tight deadline. Our recruitment team has been hard at work over the last year adapting our recruitment processes to attract the most diverse pool of candidates possible. The collaboration across the business was also key to achieving our goals.”
Our recruitment team are up against those from well-known companies including Compare the Market, Deloitte, HSBC and NHS Property Services. Winners will be announced in London on Thursday 26 September 2024.
