Head of Resourcing at E.ON UK, Becci McGugan, tells us how she transformed a slow, process-heavy recruitment experience into one that’s fast, modern, and authentic to E.ON’s culture. Implementing a candidate-driven platform rather than making changes to her ATS, Becci removed nearly all manual steps, shortening the overall experience from 16 weeks to 2 weeks. Not only are reqs being filled faster, attrition is down from 20% to 2% – which proves this candidate experience is doing it’s job to attract and retain the right people at E.ON.
Top takeaways from the webinar:
1. In our poll, 50% of attendees said candidate experience isn’t where they want it to be because the recruitment process needs work – then we can look at CX. 29% said CX hasn’t been a priority, and 21% said they’re facing technology and/or integration challenges.
2. Our guest, Becci McGugan, said the challenges she faced in recruitment last year were the same challenges she faced 14 years ago: high competition, low brand attraction, low applicant volume, long process, high drop-out, and high attrition.
3.Traditional recruitment wasn’t working, especially in a company that had shifted away from traditional energy and traditional operations. According to Becci,
“Customer service was changing, so there was a real shift in the type of person we needed to recruit. Someone who’s customer obsessed, good at solving problems, takes accountability… those are the skills we’re looking for now. We needed a more agile team, and the slick new recruitment experience is helping us get that.”
4. Moving to a digital, automated experience shortened the process from 16 weeks to 2 weeks. The application, situational judgement test, and video interview can all be done in ~22 minutes, and live interviews are usually booked within 3 days.
5. Creating an experience outside the ATS (a global platform) meant the UK Talent Acquisition team could move fast, without making expensive, difficult-to-reverse changes impacting teams across countries. Taking the standalone approach created a shortcut and a way to pilot the solution.
6. Becci’s advice for creating a better candidate experience: “Just do it. It only took us 6 weeks to build and implement the experience we wanted. We could have sat and spoke about it, and gone on about it, but we just needed to do it.”
