Greater Graduate Recruiting

Centrica Recruitment Case Study

An international energy services and solutions company who employ over 30,000 people globally. Centrica are the parent company of British Gas and a range of other energy-related businesses. 

Background

The Centrica graduate recruitment process was suffering from many of the problems typical of traditional graduate recruitment schemes; including a largely variable quality of candidates going through to their assessment centres, difficulty engaging assessors within the rest of the business, problems with some assessor ratings, low success rates, slow turnaround times and too many assessment centres, which lead to
higher recruitment costs.

Our candidate is king approach, combined with our intuitive technology stack and insightful reporting, made it the ideal assessments platform for Centrica going forwards.

Aims

We worked with the Centrica graduate recruitment team to help create a strategy to fulfil the following objectives:

• To increase the success rate of their recruiting
  
  
• Increased offer acceptance rate among candidates
  
  
• To reduce the turnaround time between candidate offer and acceptance
  
  
• To provide an engaging assessor experience
  
  
• To drastically reduce the number of assessment centres (and associated costs) required to fill vacancies
  
  
• To eliminate unconscious bias from their assessments
  
  
• To provide a great candidate experience that improves the perception of their brand
   

Our Approach

We created a modern assessment experience that combined traditional Assessment Centre exercises with the latest technology to ensure Centrica’s strategy delivered a fair and consistent experience to every candidate. 

To assist Centrica we:

• Developed an innovative virtual assessment centre (EVAL) iPad-based assessment system which eliminated paper evaluation forms from the recruitment process
  
  
• Helped to minimise assessor rating errors and unconscious bias
  
  
• Increased fairness of assessment centre exercises and enhanced the overall accuracy of assessment results
  
  
• Reduced assessor workload and fatigue
  
  
• Increased the consistency of assessments and exercises
  
  
• Provided a seamless online candidate journey to reduce stages in the process
  
  
• Helped Centrica to identify their most high-calibre candidates

The Results

Our virtual assessment centre platform (EVAL) allowed Centrica to utilise the power of data and technology to improve their recruiting of graduates across the board.

Some of the key benefits seen were:

• £25,000+ savings in Assessment Centre costs 
• 50% reduction in number of Assessment Centres needed
• Up to 75% reduction in turnaround time from offer to acceptance (from 14-20 days to 5 days) 
• Reduced unconscious bias in the selection process
• Provided a positive candidate recruitment experience that differentiated Centrica from their competitors
• Increased offer acceptance rate
• Increased success rate of candidates hired