Grant Thornton: Candidate Experience

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Richard Waite(high energy upbeat music) - My name is Richard Waite, I'm the head of resourcing at Grant Thornton in the U.K. We are a professional services and accountancy organization working across audit, tax and advisory. We have about 5000 people working for us across the U.K, part of a global network with a presence in nearly 120 countries. I was part of the original project team, actually, that implemented HireVue back in 2013, working for an organization that's got a culture whereby we're encouraged to innovate, were encouraged to bring our ideas to the table, and really take those ideas and turn them into a reality. I'm constantly challenged, constantly stretched, no six months, is like the six months that I've had previously. So for me on a personal level, it is just that constant challenge, constant movement and constant stretching to do things better, smarter, quicker, more efficient and more innovative. If I think about recruiting specifically, I think the things that I love about my role and what my team is involved in is we've got a fundamental role to play in kind of what type of organization we're all a part of, and I love the fact that we're able to have that impact through the people that we hire into the organization. The reason that we initially embarked on our journey with HireVue five or six years ago, was we saw it as an opportunity to really divert our attention towards the candidate experience more than we ever had done before. Our old recruiting process was fairly standard, it wasn't particularly differentiating, it was like a lot of other large recruiters in the U.K. And what we really challenged ourselves around was how can we make our process and candidate journey really distinctive, so that we, I guess, wowed and delighted candidates at every single touch point. And introducing HireVue, really allowed us to provide a much more candidate focused experience at that interview stage. So we've used HireVue now in the U.K. for about five or six years, and we are huge advocates for the on-demand technology as part of our training, recruitment, hiring practices. We interview a couple of thousand individuals every year and the on-demand allows us to just kind of remove that bottleneck that we used to have, within our process, just allow candidates to have a much slicker, more sophisticated experience that they can kind of choose to do at a time that suits them rather than a time that we can squeeze them in. Technology generally has allowed myself and my team to work in a much more smarter and effective way, really partnering with our internal stakeholders to provide an even better service to them on a day to day basis. It's allowed us to work with our candidates in a much more high-touch personal way than we've ever did before, where we're giving a level of candidate experience that if I think back to when I first started in recruitment, it was kind of the level of candidate experience that you always wished that you could give, but never necessarily have the time to do so, now, we're really proud of the fact. Because of implementing various pieces of technology, we now have created the space to be able to provide a much more distinctive and high-touch level of service to our candidates that ultimately wins hearts and minds. We're a purpose-led organization, we've been on the journey over the last three and a half years to shift what it means to be part of Grant Thornton and what we stand for, and part of that has been communicating it to candidates. So, by having that space to be able to spend more time with candidates talking to them about our purpose, their contribution to that purpose, what they can be involved with when they join Grant Thornton, that just meant that we're able to land that message in a much more powerful way, which ultimately means that when people join the firm, they're much more galvanized behind what we're trying to achieve as an organization and just really make much more of an impact from day one. (high energy upbeat music)

Grant Thornton wanted to differentiate their candidate journey in order to wow and delight candidates at every touchpoint. With HireVue, they are able to provide a high-touch level of service resulting in a much improved candidate-focused experience.