| The Challenge |
The Outcome |
| Poor candidate quality and inefficient recruitment processes lead to high attrition rates. |
Award-winning recruitment programme that uncovers exceptional talent and futureproofs the business. |
“We’ve got to narrow down 1200 candidates to 150 new recruits. We also need these new recruits to adapt and grow with the company, and Arctic Shores has helped us be efficient and effective with our hiring."
Tim Withnall, Interim Head of Talent Acquisition and Data
Challenge
Tim Withnall, Interim Head of Talent Acquisition and Data at RSA, is passionate about finding the right talent and creating a diverse, high-performing working environment for all employees.
Within his position at RSA, Tim’s primary objective is to introduce new selection models for candidates and efficiently onboard many individuals into highly specialised roles. Tim and his team faced difficulty identifying talent from a relatively limited pool. Therefore, they needed an effective solution to sift through more than 1,200 candidates, ensuring the selection of high-performing candidates at scale.
The existing recruitment process significantly impacted the quality of candidates selected, creating a growing problem. High attrition rates were adversely affecting day-to-day business performance. High attrition is common in the insurance sector and recently reached a worrisome 15%.
This posed a strategic challenge for RSA and its recruitment team, as high attrition can lead to missed service levels and increased handle times, especially in customer-facing roles. Reducing attrition became a mission-critical objective for the business.
Tim and the team understood that the key to tackling attrition lay in three fundamental challenges:
- Finding high-quality talent
- Accelerating time to hire
- Increase efficiency by removing unsuitable candidates quickly.
Tim and his team, including Melanie Payne, Talent Acquisition Manager at RSA, came to Arctic Shores looking to hire the right people and to accelerate the speed at which they could do this. They needed to build a recruitment program that attracted a larger talent pool of high-performers and that could then retain talent.
“The new process is fantastic. Not only does it save me time, but our attrition rates have also plummeted by 40%, proving that the right approach brings the right talent."
Melanie Payne, Talent Acquisition Manager.
Solution
RSA needed an innovative solution to recruit over 150 new starters in a competitive talent market. Wanting to do something different to stay true to their brand whilst attracting top talent, RSA looked to Arctic Shores to transform the recruitment process and help them hire for potential.
The team at RSA collaborated with an Arctic Shores business psychologist to identify the skills, traits, and behaviours they needed to select.
Once they were happy with the traits identified by our experts to show potential high-performers in the role, RSA got to work replacing the situational judgment tests (SJT) with the Arctic Shores task-based assessment. The RSA team also removed the CV under our guidance, meaning the new RSA hiring process looked like this:
- Application form
- Task-based assessment
- Interview
- Offer
This process starkly contrasted with the previous one, with Recruitment Analyst Helen Thompson and the wider RSA team manually sifting through thousands of CVs and hosting final interviews with low-quality candidates.
“At RSA, we’ve scrapped the CV. What I love about this is you get people from all walks of life that excel in roles who maybe wouldn’t have that chance otherwise."
Helen Thompson, Recruitment Analyst.
Results
The team at RSA were over-the-moon with the quality of candidates achieved through the task-based approach. After using the Arctic Shores' assessment for over a year to screen candidates, they could track attrition rates and saw a 40% reduction.
Furthermore, candidates who have undergone the Arctic Shores process have demonstrated remarkable growth in their roles, leading to promotions into leadership positions. Aaron, a candidate Helen was extremely impressed with, has now progressed to a data analysis role at RSA, demonstrating how effective it can be to nurture talent and foster professional development by using the Arctic Shores CV-less hiring playbook and hiring for potential method.
RSA has found great success by adapting its model to assess a candidate's potential rather than previous experience and asking all applicants to complete a task-based assessment to establish their “fit” for RSA. The results speak for themselves: 91% of candidates who completed the assessment reported enjoying the experience and feeling more excited about working for RSA. Tim and the RSA team have achieved a bronze award at The UK National Contact Centre Awards (CCMA's ) for their exceptional work in enhancing the new employee experience through invaluable feedback and for adopting an innovative process.
As a progressive industry leader, RSA proactively seeks regular feedback from new hires and the entire organisation as they continue hiring for potential journeys. The team has also noticed a remarkable enhancement in new hire engagement, with a notable 20% (9 months from 11 months) acceleration in attaining competency. Creating these long-lasting changes will help RSA to futureproof their business against the skills crisis and generative AI.
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