Savings and Retirement Giant Recruits 500+ Permanent Roles in Just 9 Months with Tate
Business type: Pensions and Long-Term Savings specialist
Staffing type: Customer service, contact centre, HR, finance and administration roles.
Geographical footprint: UK wide
Number of employees: 7,700
Turnover: £19.7bn per year
Company Overview
With roots that go back more than 200 years, this client is the UK’s largest long-term savings and retirement business. They offer a range of savings and retirement income products to support people across all stages of the savings lifecycle.
Over the years, they’ve successfully acquired and integrated blocks of policies from other insurers whilst selling policies directly to customers. Today, customer investments in their care amount to approximately £70 billion.
Recruitment Challenge
Following a significant acquisition, the client needed to implement a volume recruitment campaign to support the step change in growth over an 18-month period. The campaign required a headcount increase of more than 500 and was to be derived from a project-based talent acquisition campaign, alongside an increase in temporary labour with a view to eventually convert to permanent employees.
Recruitment was required across multiple UK locations, including London, Hitchin, Telford, Edinburgh, Norwich and Wythall. However, the recruitment processes for all locations were to be managed from one central account team for maximum consistency of service experience.
A wide range of roles needed to be filled, including customer service, contact centre, analyst, record management, administrative, postroom operative, HR, finance, PA/EA and team leader roles, as well as additional support for the graduate recruitment programme.
Recruitment Solution
The client approached Tate to implement a high-volume recruitment drive and build a multi-channel marketing campaign to promote their brand and values.
To prepare for the launch of the campaign, Tate’s account director held several face-to-face meetings with the client’s senior team, including the customer relations senior manager, customer operations manager, head of talent acquisition and the HR business partner, to understand the specific departmental needs and timings for onboarding and training.
The account director then appointed an account delivery team and worked with its marketing team to build a candidate attraction plan to be implemented across a number of media channels. The account delivery team members shadowed the client’s staff, including the customer service annual calculations representatives, to build an in-depth understanding of the role requirements. By doing this, they were then able to devise a series of tailored assessments for prospective candidates.
Instead of the standard interview process, we proposed using a bespoke assessment centre. Assessment centres offer several advantages, including the ability to use behavioural-based activities to measure candidates' suitability against the core role competencies and the client’s key requirements. They’re also a highly efficient way of recruiting, allowing large numbers of candidates to be assessed and qualified in just 24 hours.
“To really drive the best outcomes, we also sought - and gained - executive sponsorship of the campaign and the involvement of senior-level HR and hiring managers”
Sammy Markwick, Tate Client Services Manager
Recruitment Journey
After getting to know the client during the preparation stages, our account director identified that whilst the client offers candidates a great workplace, its brand could be strengthened to increase prominence in the marketplace, immediately attracting more candidates. Brand values are especially important to the client and were a key focus of all campaign promotions to raise the profile of its Employee Value Proposition (EVP).
Working closely with the client, our team of market specialists devised a customised marketing campaign that identified key local events that would enable us to showcase the client as an exciting local employer who is experiencing significant growth.
To support both the candidates and the client, we introduced ‘Meet and Greet’ sessions. This allowed new candidates to attend their new place of work a week before their start date. As well as offering a tour of the building, these sessions gave the candidates a chance to ask any questions before their first day. Feedback on this has been excellent, with new starters saying they felt part of the team from the very start. Subsequently, this has been continued for all new staff, both permanent and temporary.
We also introduced a balanced scorecard to capture qualitative elements of all levels of our service in the SLA, going beyond KPIs to include other metrics such as feedback, partnership and innovation, risk, and cost. These were analysed at review meetings with a red-amber-green measurement of progress to meet our client’s project deadlines.
"We have complete trust in Tate’s understanding of our values and their commitment to finding us candidates who will deliver the quality of service we want for our customers. Their proactive and attentive communication, along with their valuable insights into talent and market trends, has been instrumental in driving our continued growth. They are a true strategic partner to our business and help us offer an inclusive and rewarding workplace, for our staff to help our customers achieve the retirement they want."
Alex Ellis (She/Her) - Heritage Customer Operations Manager, Phoenix Group
The Results
- 24 individual media campaigns generated over 3,000 applicatns.
- 641 initial placements made across all locations, with a further 78 roles placed to complement the project mid-term including 3 Regional Leads.
- Filled all client vacancies over the period of 9 months.
- Staff retention has improved, and people sourced by Tate are regularly promoted to senior positions.
If you would like to find out more about Tate’s award-winning recruitment services and how we could help you find the perfect match for your company, fill in an enquiry form and one of the team will be in touch with you shortly.
