Ruth Wakefield is the Client Services Director for Randstad, and amongst other things, is responsible for their significant client Jaguar Land Rover, based primarily in the West Midlands. Today, Ruth gives a rare insight into how she’s driven change at Randstad and implemented a more humanistic recruitment and onboarding process, whilst removing the unconscious bias so often associated with blue-collar roles, on behalf of JLR and Randstad. The background Ruth Wakefield: “Randstad are responsible for the recruitment of Production Operatives for JLR. Whilst the role is considered semi-skilled and we do not need to recruit applicants with previous experience, the right attitude and attributes are incredibly important in our recruitment criteria. We need to ensure workers are fully engaged with our clients values and goals. Despite the huge numbers involved for this one client, ISV.Online has facilitated a more humanistic way of recruiting whilst removing the unconscious bias. Where many Agencies are removing the human touch in favour of websites, form filling and AI, we’ve been able with ISV.Online to take a deeper look at what it actually means to be a humanistic Recruiter. In 2023, we received over 30,000 applicants for roles on behalf of this one client, but when we received 5,000+ applicants in a 20-day business period, we recognised we needed to streamline things at Randstad in order to offer a better, faster and more accurate Recruitment service, whilst ensuring we focused on delivering a positive experience for applicants. Put simply, there was room to do things better and reduce costs whilst facilitating continued growth. That said, we also needed to ensure we didn’t slow the recruitment onboarding, nor introduce a distraction for our fantastic Recruitment teams, nor increase the steps needed to implement a more humanistic approach to Recruiting. The ‘blue-collar’ sector has always been fast-paced and challenging, but with ISV.Online we found the solution which we implemented in January 2024 – and the results have been transformational. ‘Wood for the trees’ 30,000 applicants in 12 months is a challenge, but so is physically pre-screening 13,763 people for interviews, and so is selecting and organising over 9,000 dexterities assessments with our client. But hidden in these figures were also things we needed to address. Lots of fantastic applicants yes, lots of activity yes, but also high volumes of candidate no-shows for the clients dexterity assessment along with a potential creep in the time to hire. We’re committed to improving the quality of applicants being put forward to our client, whilst also increasing volume, and so introduced ISV.Online. Their pre-screening assessments have allowed us to reduce the post application steps, weed out poor matches far earlier on and grow Recruiter confidence by educating them on those applicants with superior characteristics, personality traits and cognitive abilities. We’ve also been able to improve the time to hire significantly, and many of the typical timewasting and distractions associated with operational recruiting have albeit stopped. We did this with the help of ISV.Online, whose team of psychometricians and assessments designers worked with Randstad to create an assessment that allowed us to focus on the very cognitive skills, personality traits and experience our client requires in order to keep automotive product lines operating 24/7 and driving a customer-first approach within their business. By testing applicants earlier in the onboarding process, we’ve significantly reduced the number pre-screening interviews we need to conduct whilst also improving the attendance rates at face-to-face testing/interview stage by 8%; additionally the test removes any unconscious bias at this stage of the process. We’ve delivered a superior service with 10,000 fewer interviews, which for Randstad specifically represents over £100,000 in savings alone, but more importantly means we’re spending increased time with the quality applicants, and we understand far more deeply the skills and requirements our client requires. The results The stats speak for themselves: Pre-screened pass rates improved from 61% to 84% in less than a year. We’ve avoided tens of thousands of wasted interviews, calls, texts and emails. We now boast almost twice as many applicants passing the pre-screening interview with Jaguar Land Rover. We have reduced the percentage of no-shows for Jaguar Land Rovers by nearly 50%. Jaguar Land Rover has seen an 8% uplift in candidates passing their inhouse dexterity tests Candidates love the fact that pre-screened applicants are now far more likely to get the role. We can cope with double the volume of applicants, whilst deliver a better service. Randstad and Jaguar Land Rover already had a great relationship, but with ISV.Online it’s clear to see we’re offering an exceptional service and an exceptional hit rate. The cherry on the cake is that as part of this new onboarding process, we have more than doubled the percentage of successful starters that have passed through the full Randstad and JLR onboarding process. Quite literally tens of thousands of applicants are now more likely to experience a slicker recruitment process with Randstad, and the right people are more likely to find the right role with us. This humanistic assessment-based onboarding has been key to scaling growth at JLR and I’m proud to have improved so significantly our hit rate, time to high and service more generally. It’s been great to work with ISV.Online! ***** ISV.Online is the leading supplier of skills testing software and services to the UK Recruitment Industry. Used by 9 of the top 10 UK agencies, by number of offices, and 7 of the top 10, by revenue, ISV.Online offers candidate skills assessment and evaluation software and online training tools, allowing agencies and in-house HR/recruitment teams to validate the skills of potential candidates and existing employees across a wide range of areas.
