Retail screening with an improved candidate experience in 15 minutes

Retail Challenges

William Hill is a successful British gaming company and part of evoke plc. It operates around 1,300 shops across the UK and receives over 30,000 applications for retail roles each year, which historically were manually screened. It could take over 2 weeks to progress preferred applicants to interview, resulting in a slow candidate experience, and often losing candidates to offers from elsewhere. 

The William Hill team wanted to reduce the time it took to screen candidates, maximise candidate quality, reduce time-to-offer, improve candidate experience, and improve the hiring manager experience.

A Streamlined Solution

William Hill partnered with Hirevue and AMS to design and launch a new technology-driven process. They worked with Hirevue’s occupational psychology team to define the skills, competencies, and behaviours that are required for job success in Customer Service and Team Leader roles. 

Hirevue was then able to deliver a games-based assessment to screen for specific high-performing characteristics, allowing William Hill to automate the initial screening stage. If candidates demonstrated the right aptitudes, they were pre-qualified and booked for an interview within 24 hours.

The assessment only took candidates 15 minutes to complete and received candidate satisfaction scores of 9.3 out of 10 on average. It also delivered improved candidate diversity as it allowed William Hill to screen candidates solely against the skills required for the role, rather than using arbitrary criteria such as previous experience or academic qualifications.

Improved Speed and Quality

• Time from application to scheduled interview reduced from an average of 15 days, to just 1.8 days.
• Candidate experience feedback has been outstanding, with AMS Candidate Satisfaction ratings of 9.5 out of 10 on average.
• Hirevue’s candidate satisfaction feedback also captured a 93% satisfaction rating. Written feedback included comments such as; “I felt at ease, as a person with ADHD and dyslexia I felt it accommodated my way of thinking.” 
• Hiring manager satisfaction ratings were outstanding, averaging 8.8 out of 10. Hiring Managers appreciated the increased speed, allowing them to backfill vacancies quickly. 
• Candidate quality was regarded favourably by hiring managers. The application – interview – offer ratio averaged c. 12: 4: 1, with slightly higher interview numbers completed as hiring managers typically wished to meet all shortlisted candidates. 

“The implementation of Hirevue has supported the speed of getting candidates into our c.1300 shops, which has been fantastic in filling gaps left by the somewhat transient nature of our workforce. The improved time to interview has played a pivotal role in this, and feedback from managers has been great with the speed of hire reducing the burdens placed on them. Moreover, the interactive and seamless nature of the Hirevue assessment has resulted in strong candidate feedback scores, which set a great first impression with our candidates before they join William Hill as employees.” People Partner, evoke plc