When you're processing over 162,000 applications a year to fill roles across 2,400 shops, the margin for error in your hiring process isn't just slim — it's practically nonexistent. Get it wrong and you're stuck on a hamster wheel: hiring, onboarding, losing, repeating. Get it right and the benefits cascade across the entire business.
That's the reality Andrew Porter, Group Resourcing Director at Entain, faced when he set about transforming high volume hiring for one of the UK's largest sports betting and gaming groups. Entain — the company behind Ladbrokes and Coral — employs around 30,000 people globally, with nearly 12,700 colleagues in UK retail alone. The retail estate contributes roughly a billion pounds in net gaming revenue annually, and Entain holds a 42% share of the UK's sports betting shop market.
In this episode of the TA Disruptors podcast, Andrew shares how his team scrapped the CV, removed telephone screening, introduced behavioural assessment, and redesigned the in-shop hiring experience — cutting attrition from 40% to 25% and saving an estimated 9,000 hours of screening time. Here's what TA leaders hiring at scale can learn from Entain's approach.
Why did Entain move away from CV-based hiring?
Andrew's starting position on CVs is unequivocal: "I fail to understand in any other industry where a tool that's been around five, six hundred years is still deployed today."
For Entain's retail roles, the CV was particularly ill-suited. The company hires from age 18 upwards, across part-time and full-time positions. Many candidates have no directly relevant experience in a regulated betting environment — and there's no reason they should. What matters isn't what's on a candidate's CV but whether they have the raw behavioural qualities to succeed in a complex, high-stakes role.
And at 162,000 applications per year, manually screening CVs wasn't just ineffective — it was physically impossible to do well. The team was caught in a cycle of volume-driven sourcing, spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on job boards to keep the pipeline full, without any confidence that the candidates coming through were the right ones. Attrition sat at 40%, which meant some roles were being filled two or three times a year. As Andrew puts it, that's not good for anyone — not for the team, not for the store manager, and not for the business.
What makes high volume hiring in a betting shop so complex?
One of the most striking parts of Andrew's story is just how demanding Entain's retail roles actually are. This isn't standard high street retail. Staff in Ladbrokes and Coral shops are expected to handle significant amounts of cash, act as compliance officers for the Gambling Commission, monitor customer behaviour, intervene when someone has been betting too long, and in many cases do all of this while working solo in a small shop.
"Influencing a customer who has bet too much for too long, needs to take a step away — we need to understand whether you can do that," Andrew explains. That's a fundamentally different ask from stacking shelves or working a till — particularly when the person doing the influencing may be 18 or 19, speaking to a customer decades older.
The regulatory dimension adds another layer. The Gambling Commission holds Entain accountable for responsible gambling practices, and getting it wrong carries serious consequences: reputational damage, compliance investigations, and potentially fines. As the briefing for the episode makes clear, Entain operates at the intersection of cash, regulation, and emotionally charged customers. The quality of frontline hiring directly determines operational, regulatory, and reputational risk. In their retail business, staff are the brand.
How did Entain redesign its hiring process for high volume roles?
Rather than patching individual stages, Andrew took a holistic approach — starting not with technology, but with people and understanding. Within his first six months, he personally visited three retail stores in his local area to observe the complexity first-hand. His team regularly meets with shop colleagues to stay close to the operating reality.
That ground-level insight was then blended with occupational psychology expertise to identify the five behaviours most predictive of success in the role: interacting, influencing, adapting, organising, and processing. These became the foundation for an entirely new hiring process.
The old process was straightforward: post on job boards, collect CVs, sift manually, phone screen, interview. The new process stripped out both CV sifting and telephone screening entirely, replacing them with an online behavioural assessment at the top of the funnel. The candidate journey is now: apply, complete the assessment, have a discussion with a recruiter, attend an in-store interview, and receive an outcome.
The assessment served a dual purpose. First, it filtered for genuine interest — candidates who weren't committed to the role self-selected out before completing it. Second, it measured the behavioural qualities that actually matter, giving the team a far richer signal than any CV could provide. Out of 162,000 applications, approximately 35,000 assessments were completed, with completion rates of 70–80% among those who started. The team also redesigned the in-store interview, introducing a structured interview pack with a clear scoring matrix, a task-based element, and mandatory hiring manager training.
Andrew is emphatic about the sequencing. His framework is people first, process second, technology last. "AI on a bad process is just going to scale a bad process," he says. Entain changed its global ATS at the same time as the hiring process redesign, but the process came first. The technology served the process, not the other way around.
What results did Entain see from transforming its high volume hiring?
The numbers tell a compelling story. Attrition dropped from 40% to 25% — a shift Andrew is careful to credit as a cross-functional effort involving people partnering, onboarding improvements, and hiring manager development alongside the process redesign.
That reduction in attrition drove a cascade of efficiencies. Annual hires fell from over 5,000 to around 3,000 — not because there were fewer roles, but because people were staying longer. The interview-to-offer ratio improved from 1:5 to 1:3, meaning the team was spending time with higher-quality candidates at every stage. The recruiting team naturally resized from 10 to six without any forced reductions. Sourcing spend dropped significantly as the need for high-volume job board advertising diminished. And the business saved an estimated 9,000 hours of screening time by removing manual CV sifting and telephone screening from the process.
Candidate experience improved markedly too. Entain rebooted its Net Promoter Score survey in early 2025 with far more granular measurement across every stage of the process. The result: a candidate NPS of +53, which sits firmly in world-class territory. Hiring manager NPS came in at +36 — "great, not brilliant," as Andrew puts it — and is trending towards 40.
For store managers, less attrition means less time spent repeatedly hiring, training, and onboarding for the same role. People stay longer, become more productive, and the business benefits from consistency in a regulated environment where consistency matters enormously.
How do you get hiring managers on board when you scrap the CV?
Andrew acknowledges the scepticism head-on. The CV is a comfort blanket — hiring managers are trained on it, they're used to it, and removing it feels risky. His approach was rooted in classic change management principles, but with a few practical touches that made the difference.
First, communication and collaboration from the outset. The retail team, people partners, and store managers were involved in shaping the new process rather than having it imposed. Second, ongoing support: even today, the team runs weekly "Pit Stop" drop-in sessions where any hiring manager can get virtual support with the process. There are also dedicated regional recruiters aligned to support and guide hiring managers, along with standardised recruitment guides available in every store and online.
Third — and this was particularly effective — celebrating early adopters. Entain introduced a hiring manager of the month across UK retail, holding up those who embraced the new process as exemplars for others. That recognition built momentum and made the change self-reinforcing.
"It's the same as any big transformational change journey," Andrew says. "It's about communication, collaboration, understanding where people are uncomfortable. It's about ongoing support."
Can this approach scale across geographies and business units?
Entain is already proving that it can. The retail model is now being activated in the company's global customer care division — a function that had been operating with 15 different hiring processes across multiple countries. The aim is to drive a consistent, scalable approach with a global quality bar and reliable, comparable data.
Early results from a trial in India mirror the UK experience: assessment completion rates above 70%, candidate satisfaction in the 90% range, and strong signals of improved quality. Andrew notes that the highest response rates have come from the Indian market — a result he wasn't expecting but which demonstrates that the principles transfer across geographies when the process is sound.
The company is also exploring behavioural assessment for management-level retail roles, extending the approach beyond entry-level hiring. Andrew's advice for anyone attempting this kind of scaling is to start with a proof of concept rather than a big bang. Entain piloted the approach in a subset of retail locations, gathered the metrics, refined the process, and then expanded. That test-and-learn discipline — combined with the credibility built through early results — made scaling significantly easier.
Sequence transformation as people → process → technology. Get your team's mindset right, design a process that works, then use technology to scale it. Automating a broken process just scales the problem.
This article captures the highlights, but Andrew's full conversation with Robert Newry is packed with additional detail on navigating stakeholder buy-in, the nuances of hiring in a regulated environment, and what's next for Entain's talent acquisition strategy.
Listen to the full episode below.
If you're rethinking how your organisation approaches high volume hiring, explore how Arctic Shores can help.
Robert Newry - Arctic Shores Co-Founder and Chief Explorer
Andrew Porter - Group Resourcing Director, Entain
Robert: Welcome to the TA Disruptors podcast. I'm Robert Newry, co-founder and chief explorer at Arctic Shores, the task-based psychometric assessment company that helps organisations uncover potential and see more in people.
We continue our series focus on ripping up the rule book in volume hiring. And in today's episode, we will be talking to someone who has transformed the recruitment of retail staff across 2,400 shops throughout the UK. I'm delighted to welcome Andrew Porter, Group Resourcing Director at Entain PLC. Entain is one of the world's largest sports betting and gaming groups, employing around 30,000 people globally. Entain has 35 brands in its portfolio, and most listeners will know it through Ladbrokes and Coral.
Andrew has a long and impressive career in talent acquisition, spanning multiple sectors and organisations where the common themes seem to be recruitment transformation and diversity, equity and inclusion. I first met you nearly 10 years ago now when you were head of talent acquisition at Europe at Diageo and what struck me then and continues I think to be one of the things that makes you stand out in the industry is your enthusiasm and energy to make the world of talent acquisition better. And since that first meeting, we've worked together at RSM components, CAPTA, PA consulting, and now Entain. And if I want a perspective on recruitment transformation, you are one of my key go-to TA leaders.
And I also especially like your four simple rules that you put on LinkedIn about how you approach your professional life, which are work hard but have fun, be honest with everyone you deal with, be yourself, and most importantly, treat yourself and others with equal amounts of respect. Andrew, welcome to the TA Disruptors podcast.
Andrew: Thanks very much, Robert. Lovely to be here.
Robert: So let's start by talking about what high volume and if you'll excuse the pun high stakes hiring looks like at Entain. And for people who do not know Entain well perhaps you can paint a picture of what does your retail footprint look like and what are the resourcing challenges that come with such a large estate?
Andrew: The retail estate is a significant part of our overall business. It probably represents almost 50% of our total business. have around 12,500 colleagues here just in the UK out of the 30,000 that you mentioned. So a significant part of our business and that's across an estate of nearly 2004, just over 2,400 shops. So it's a huge… national entity for us. And as you quite rightly said, Labrooks and Coral is the two brands that people will know us primarily for being on the high street.
We shouldn't also neglect the fact that it also brings in a huge amount of revenue for our business overall, particularly in the UK, where we're looking at somewhere in the order of a billion pounds worth of net revenue that actually contributes to the success of the business each year. And I think also just contextualising it with the marketplace, we run around 40% of the shops on the high streets in the UK as well. It's an enormous entity.
Robert: It’s a big footprint across the community as well across the UK.
Andrew: Absolutely. And really quite a complex business to run and to staff and all those things that we'll no doubt talk about in the...
Robert: Yes. And we will definitely come to those. And I imagine, you know, with a footprint that big, there's quite a lot of hiring that's going on. So how many roles roughly are you getting? And I imagine probably quite a lot of applications too.
Andrew: Yeah, so it's actually reduced over the last couple of years and for reasons that we'll talk about. But last year we hired just over 3,000 people into those roles. And you can imagine to get to the 3,000, the volume of applications that we had. And that was somewhere coming up to 163,000 applications.
Robert: 163,000, gosh, that's a huge number.
Andrew: It is. And it's when I kind of look at what we've done over the last two or three years, that number of applications has actually reduced for various different reasons, the change in how we hire. But it is still an enormous. But I think what's really interesting is that we only have a team of six people and one manager who actually manage and deliver all of that hiring.
obert: Sixpeople covering that sort of volume. think, you know, if you look at my most normal recruiting benchmarks, number of open roles that you expect from a recruiter, the volume that you have to go through, that seems a remarkably small team. And is that the team that you are… at now or is that the size of the team you inherited?
Andrew: Well, interestingly, I think you're absolutely right. So I should call out the phenomenal effort of that team because they are amazing. And they've really embraced us so much change over the last two years. And a lot of the change that we've put in has actually helped us run a more effective and efficient hiring process. And therefore we don't need actually as big a team. So that team was about 10 people when I inherited it.
Robert: You know, even the bigger, but still not huge.
Andrew: And I think that's you know, it's testament to kind of even the process before we made changes would had been managed and was slick It was just huge volumes and as I say bear in mind that our volumes have reduced from about five, five and a half thousand hires with ten people to three thousand hires with six people right so
You know, we've managed down the number of applications, we've managed down the team size, but it's still all about quality and speed and making sure our retail colleagues get what they need.
Robert: Yes, and we're going to come to how you managed to make those changes and those reductions. But it's useful just to understand the scale and the complexity of your recruiting environment and what your team are having to support.
And I suppose let's just dig a bit into that sort of complexity piece because I think it helps set the scene well for your ability to transform and change because of the setup there. So perhaps you can just sort of bring that to life a bit as to what makes your environment higher stakes than the typical retail environment. Because when you mention retail and retail shops, people probably think of typical high street clothing stores rather than, or shoes or whatever, rather than betting shops. But I imagine it's...a very different environment in a betting shop from a typical retail one.
Andrew: It most definitely is, and I love the pun by the way, high stakes. And actually there's a really serious dimension to that high stakes. And I don't want to get sort of too serious about it but you know the sports betting gaming industry in the UK is so heavily regulated and I that's almost the starting point to answer your question which is that is the context in which we operate and which our colleagues in the retail estate have to operate they're accountable to the gaming commission here in the UK and so the onus of regulation and what that puts on our colleagues is the starting point for how do we find the right people to actually go into a shop environment. And I think sometimes shop stores, whatever you want to call them, is kind of a bit of a misnomer. It's the reality.
We have a shop front that most of them are on the high street. But I think the complexity of what our colleagues in those environments have to deal with is the high stakes. You have got people who handle significant amounts of money. You have got people who are interacting with customers having to be compliance officers, checking that we comply with the gaming commission's rules about looking after people who are in our environment. Whether it's online or whether it's physical, we still have a responsibility to act responsibly. So we're asking people in store to monitor how much people are betting, how much they're using the machines in store, intervening, asking people to step away and maybe go outside, take a break.
No one's saying that they can't continue to play, but we have to be responsible for that. Opening and shutting stores on a solo basis. These are all the complexities that you don't normally find, as you quite rightly said, in a normal high street environment. And some of those shops are small, so some of them are solo manned.
So you have to think about colleague safety, you know, what they're doing and being asked to do and how we protect them. And obviously, we're across every kind of high street, every kind of environment across the UK. So it is a very complex business to be able to staff and to kind of get consistency in how we hire, but nevertheless adaptability to the local environment.
Robert: To the local situation, yeah, I get that. And it'll be interesting when we come to it shortly as to how you went about trying to create that consistency. But I imagine also the challenge around this too, if it's heavily regulated, that making change is not straightforward either because any change into the way that you hire, the way that you identify people has implications then for how that delivery of the service as it were or what you provide is then made. And so that, certainly my experience, regulated businesses tend to have a degree of risk aversion. Was that what you found when you arrived as well or were they a bit more open to?
Andrew: No, I think the one thing that I would say about our colleagues in the retail business is that they've really welcomed the change and I think probably not a lot had changed and whereas the regulation had changed quite significantly, and so to satisfy the regulator that we're doing everything, anything that drives consistency, everything that drives a standard of hiring that then allows the people we hire to do the job that the gaming commission are expecting them to do is positive.
And actually, I think we have a really good reputation that's been hard worked at and hard won by our retail colleagues for doing the right thing. That's one of our values is doing what's right. And we take that really, really seriously as well. So I think to your point, I don't think, and our experience is, that we didn't have a heavy door to push open. People were welcoming of that.
Yes, there's lots of things that we need to think about in changing and transforming how we hire, not least of which we changed a global ATS at the same time as reinventing the hiring process, which was interesting. But it was largely welcomed.
Robert: hat's useful to get that context around this complex environment, very different setups for different locations, requirements around that regulated, no real consistency, you're changing your ATS at the time too. And then what was the… What was the kind of metrics that were going on there? Was recruiting largely working or was this something that when you came in you thought, hang on, I really do need to try and get on top of this in a slightly different way?
Andrew: I think I referenced it before. I wouldn't want to take anything away from what was happening before I arrived because I think it was the, ironically, was the one part of the talent acquisition or resourcing function that actually worked really well.
It had been really rigorously worked and managed by the team then. I think what's happened is the business has changed. And also, I said, some of the metrics that you talked about, we were running at 0 % attrition. Which is huge.
Robert: I know that for the retail and sometimes for those types of roles, that's a kind of industry standard. But in terms of the work that creates then, you were saying like 5,000 roles you're just replacing it's, you know, like hamster on a wheel almost at that…
Andrew: When you start to dig into that, you know, you were replacing one role maybe two or three times a year. You know, and that's not good for anyone. That's if you kind of put yourself in a hiring manager, shop manager or a marketplace manager, so these are people that look after multiple shops, having to hire someone, train someone, onboard someone and have them last three, four, five, six months.
Robert: It’s almost like a wasted effort.
Andrew: It is. So I think a lot of things have been done, not only from the hiring perspective, but actually working with our people partnering colleagues as well to make that whole joining the business and wanting to stay much better. And the irony is we have so many long-serving colleagues in retail. I mean people who've done 25, 30, 40 years service. So for some people it is, you know, it's really their life.
Robert: Their passion and something that they enjoy.
Andrew: Exactly. But it's also trying to find new people who are going to have to replace some of those longer servers at some point who want to have that same degree of passion. And I guess, you know, if you're into sports and you can impart that passion with customers, you kind of get to watch sport all day in the shop. I'm not saying that they don't do any work, but it's in that environment. So you can be passionate and bring your passion to the role as well. So yeah, there's a lot that goes into that environment.
Robert: And that's what you have to kind of figure out. So let's dig into that a bit now. And I know you shared with me as well this idea that the CV is not really a great indicator of somebody's potential to do a role and that's the affinity that we've shared and why we've worked so well together over the years.
If we know that the CV doesn't provide… great signals for whether somebody could be successful in the type of complex regulated role in a betting shop, then how did you go about determining, what are the things, what are the signals that you should be looking for? And then from there, I suppose, then start thinking about how do you… address your recruiting process to start picking up on those signals?
Andrew: Well, let's start with the CV. You know, I failed to understand in any other industry where a tool that's been around five, six hundred years is still deployed today.
So that's my starting point, which I just don't understand in the age of technology where we are, how we're still using that as a tool to make a judgment. The great thing about our retail colleagues is we hire everybody from 18 because they have to be legally able to work in the environment upwards.
We have part-time opportunities, full-time opportunities, et cetera. we cover the panoply of people who work.
Robert: Yes, everyone who is available in the workplace.
Andrew: Exactly. So that in itself as well, combined with an ancient tool, doesn't feel like the right place to start. And you go back to the numbers that we were talking about, you can't possibly screen, even today, 162,000.
Robert:Yeah, CVs…
Andrew: it's meaningless.
Robert: And it clearly wasn't providing a great signal, which we knew, but when you see 40% attrition, there's the data tells the story.
Andrew: And it becomes that hamster wheel of just kind of really filling a role to fill a role. And that's not a slight on anyone who is involved in that process, but there has to be something different in today. And so we've kind of gone to the behaviours model which is if we don't actually need to worry about the CV and experience because as an 18-year-old what experience have you got that's relevant in a regulated sports betting…
Robert: You can't even give competencies to that almost because they just won't know, they'll have to be trained in that.
Andrew: Completely. And I think that's the other thing is that what we're looking for is the raw ingredients. And so we switched through the work that we've done to change the hiring process to a, prove to us that you have the right behaviours. I've already outlined some of the complexities of working in a shop, but having to influence, let's just take that as a behaviour.
Having to influence a customer who has bet too much for too long, needs to take a step away. We need to understand whether you can do that. If you are a solo worker in a shop, and you have to step away from the counter, go and talk to people.
Robert: And particularly if there's an age difference in that too. 18, 19, 20 going to talk to somebody 50, 55…
Andrew: Absolutely. So, influencing becomes like a really good and important skill that we have to have, our people have. Kind of processing big pieces of information as well. There's a lot going on, again, you could be solo, you could be with one other person in a store having to prioritise and think about what comes first, what comes second, etc. So moving to that model enables you then to kind of take a different approach.
And that's really the theme that we've worked with and worked very collaboratively with our store colleagues, with our people partnering colleagues. And I really think it's made a significant difference, and you know give you one sort of sound bite of you talked about 40% of we talked about 40% attrition that has now gone down to 25% over the last few years.
Robert: That’s huge. I will ask you to the business then isn't it if you think of the numbers that you're talking about and I suppose that explains then how you went from five thousand hires annually down to three thousand a big chunk of that is not that you're you have less roles is that you just have less attrition.
Andrew: Absolutely. And I also want to say that's not, I'm not claiming the win on that one. You know, we've collaborated with our people partnering colleagues who've looked at multiple different touch points, whether it's onboarding, whether it's, you know, how hiring managers hire or then look after people. It's a complete effort with everybody to kind of go, we can slow the stem the tide of people leaving, actually we can be more mindful and more effective with choosing better but fewer people.
And I know fewer is relevant or is, you know, kind of it's a relevant term in terms of 5,000 to 3,000 hires. But it's it's a big shift for the business. And that means less cost in the business and we've seen we don't need as many people in the TA team. We haven't had to do anything forcibly to do that. We've just naturally resized the team over time. But you can only do that if you can be more effective.
Robert: Effective, sure. How did you, because you talked about influencing and one of the challenges I always think for talent acquisition is traditionally they've been treated as a, I have a requisition, go fill it, as opposed to a trusted advisor in all of this. And so when you're trying to make this big shift and you alluded to that you spent time talking to people, but what other things did you do to try and find out what was the essence of what would make somebody successful in a retail store?
Andrew: Well, I think one of the things I did personally was within, I think, the first six months I was in the business, I actually went out to a retail, in fact, three retail stores in my local area. Yes. And that just shows you the complexity, in the area I live, we have three different shops, two different brands within two miles of each other.
And so very different red and blue, different setups. One's like a multi-person store. One is a individual staffed store. And it's not until you go and really understand that complexity and to some of the things that I've shared with you already, that I think you kind of get a ha moment, which is this is not...
Robert: It's not your typical job description you can read on something.
Andrew: Not at all. Not at all. I think to get that level of understanding, and so do all of our team, they regularly meet with people, they regularly go out and have interactions with our shop colleagues.
So I think it's really understanding that, but then taking that insight and blending it with psychologists.
Robert: I was going say, so did that help too? Did you bring in some subject matter experts?
Andrew: Absolutely. You know, and I think that's where… you need the context of the real operating environment and blend that with how can we do things differently and shift away from, you know, just mountains of CVs into something that is far more engaging for our candidates. know, the assessment…
Robert: Yeah can you just share how did the process shift then? So what did you, what does it look like today as opposed to...
Andrew: So, largely what we used to do is we used to post a job out on all the well-known job boards and people would just apply. know, they are retail jobs, so therefore anybody who was looking for a retail job would apply. That was...
Robert: Irrespective of whether they understood why they were going into
Andrew: That literally would be the tsunami of applications that would come in. So the team would just constantly wade through this endless… mountain of CVs and actually one is it's interesting actually because the shift from how we used to hire and how we now hire was almost, oh we not getting enough applications? And it's like, how much is enough?
Robert: Yes. And people do work because they're of used to that overload and think, oh, there'll be a diamond in the rough there somewhere. Which is why we need the volume as opposed to, actually, if get the right people applying, you don't have to do that needle in the haystack stuff.
Andrew: So what we did is a sort of shift from, we still advertise in the same place, but we put an online assessment in place. And the online assessment actually acted as a filter because all of a sudden you had all those people who'd applied being invited to take the assessment and they didn't want to.
Robert: So it showed whether they were really, had they really understood it? Because if they had, and particularly I think it becomes, because often we have this debate with people of, well, if they don't do it, are you putting them off? Well, actually, if they're applying for something they don't really understand, then you do need to put them off. I think that's an important part. And then secondly, if they do understand what they're applying for and that they've read the way that you change the job advert, these are the kind of behaviours then they will understand why they need to do an assessment on this. And in many cases, people I think celebrate that they don't need to put a CV forward and that they can demonstrate what they're capable of, which is such an important part. If you're going to move away from the CV, you've got to have something else that acts as a signal.
Andrew: And I think also it kind of tests some of those behaviours that we were actually talking about earlier, that if people are embracing a new and different way of applying for a role… if they've got the fortitude to go through the assessment and understand it, then they've already kind of demonstrated some of those behaviours that we want without even seeing the report as to whether they've achieved what they need to achieve through the process.
Robert: And I think it's worth understanding too that it's not necessarily a big barrier there, because in the past that used to be the way that...certainly when I started in the industry was, well, it will give them a 90 minute assessment that really tests their resolve as to whether they want to apply for this job. But that wasn't the length of the assessment that you were putting there. It was so uh much less than that.
Andrew: We're talking about 30 to 40 minutes. We're covering a whole range of different behaviours. And I think the good thing that we found is the level of engagement that we've got. First of all from candidates. You know, if you look at the completion rates for those people, they're incredibly high.
Robert: Have you got an idea of that?
Andrew: I would say it's 70 to 80% of people who actually take this assessment, actually complete it. And I think that's what sort of slightly freaked our team out. Was that we've gotten less applications, but we were seeing more people like high completion levels and people are like, no we need more and it's like no you don't you're actually you know that it's doing what it was designed to do which is it first of all
Robert: filtering out those who aren't really committed may not even have the right behavioral qualities
Andrew: then it's cutting out through the actual assessment cutoff process, the ones we take forward and the ones that we don't. So it's been a really big mindset shift for everybody. And then we've also kind of reinvented the actual in-shop process as well.
Robert: Right, okay, so there was the assessment piece.
Andrew: That's part one.
Robert: And part two was, right, what happens then when you come in for the, and that was an in-person in shop.
Andrew: Yeah, and so we've kind of remodelled now the entire experience for candidates or for applicants for shop roles. And I think, yeah, it's a big transformation, it's a big communication exercise. You need to get the stakeholders, our store colleagues, our store managers on board.
Robert: And there must be some scepticism from there.
Andrew: Oh, massively.
Robert: To start with, saying, hang on, you're taking away the CV. But that's what I'm used to. I always talk about it as like the comfort blanket. And that's probably one of the reasons why it's lasted 500 years. It's because it's a comfort blanket… all trained.
Andrew: We're all trained on it.
Robert: So how did you you know, if you rip away the comfort blanket, you've got to give them something else and a reassurance. So how did you deal with that?
Andrew: Look I think it's the same as any big transformational change journey. It's about communication, collaboration, understanding where people are uncomfortable. It's about ongoing support as well. You know, even today we have hiring drop-ins for any hiring managers who, you know, not every hiring manager hires even every year. So there are possibly some hiring managers who are hiring now that have never hired in this new format.
So we continue, the team actually run regular drop-ins to say if you've got any problems, if you've got any misunderstandings or just want to just chat through the hiring. You know, we run those regularly. We also champion great hiring managers to hold them up as exemplars of running the new process.
Robert: Oh Okay, so you were celebrating those that were willing to make the change and probably saw the benefits of it. And that's the best way.
Andrew: We have a hiring manager of the month hiring manager of the quarter. So it's really lovely to be able to celebrate and to reward people for embracing that chain.
Robert: So did that become self-fulfilling then? I mean, you'll get a little, always get a lot of scepticism to start with. Then you start having a hiring manager of the month who's able to then say, and then did that help build the momentum?
Andrew: I think so. I think most definitely. And I think the complexity that we mentioned earlier, but it's worth just surfacing again, is that we also changed the global ATS as well. And we took a system away that had been tailored within an inch of its life to support the retail business.
Robert: And the CV, I imagine, too.
Andrew: Yeah. And it did everything that they wanted it to do. But when we changed the global ATS, it had to be fit for everyone, not just for one part of the business. So there were compromises that we had to make and that we had to coach the business through to say it has to work for everybody. So you're not going to get exactly what you had before, but we're going to do this big change as well in terms of the hiring process.
Robert: Yeah. And it'll be interesting to see what, because you've done this many times, Andrew. It’ll be interesting your take on this one because I've always felt that we've got to get the hiring process right first and then you automate it. And the automation is not a silver bullet. And if you've got a not very good process and you automate it, you just scale not very good, which sounds blindingly obvious. And yet that is in many cases, I've seen organisations go, oh, we've got a global project now to replace the ATS, and that's it and you're kind looking at, what about the process? Because how is that going to work? And so was that kind of useful for you that you were changing the ATS and that gave you the right then to change the process?
Andrew: I would go one step further and it's weird because I was talking about this with somebody exactly this morning, which actually I think it starts with people, then the process, then the
Robert: Yes, you've got to get the mind.
Andrew: If you haven't got people with the right...capabilities in your own team or the right mindset in your own team. It's very hard to then get them on board to then get your stakeholders on board. And to your point exactly, unless you've got everybody buying into what the process is and that it needs to change or it's going to be adapted or whatever, you can't then use the technology to drive at scale those changes. So it very much for me is always about people first, process second, technology last. And by technology, let's also include automation, AI, etc.
Because you're right, know, rubbish in rubbish out. AI in on a bad process is just going to scale a bad process. And it doesn't, it won't yield. And I'm a massive believer in AI. So, you know, even at my tender age, I really feel that that's something that we should be embracing, but in the right way. So I completely subscribe to the philosophy of yes, automation and AI, but on something that actually works first. Otherwise you're going to have an absolute disaster on your hands.
Robert: Well, that's right. And you end up putting in technology for technology's sake on that. We'll come in a minute to, you know, what's next around that. I'm sure it'll be a mixture of technology and process for you. But just to kind of finish off this piece of the discussion. So you changed your process around that. I'm a great believer in that. I often talk about the golden thread and you've got to change everything to look at it holistically. What kind of results then did you see from this?
Andrew: So we've already talked about one, which is the attrition number. And again, not claiming the win on that as a solo party or as a team, ots of collaboration on that. I think the other thing that we've been really focused on is experience. And we rebooted our Net Promoter Score, Candidate Experience, Hiring Manager Experience survey in January of 2025. So last year, just finished, was the first year that we have an entire year's worth of results.
And our NPS, we used to use NPS, but this was a complete reboot, so the survey that we now do is much, much clearer in terms of being able to measure experience, not just overall, literally every aspect of the process from beginning to end. So we can actually drill down into.
Robert: Right, so a lot more thorough.
Andrew: Exactly. And so I give that as context because our candidate NPS at the end of last year was 53, positive 53.
Robert: Wow, that was just really high. mean, for those people who aren't necessarily familiar with NPS, think anything...
Andrew: It’s world class.
Robert: I was going to say, anything over plus 20 is good, plus 30 is starting to move into very good, plus 50 you're into excellence.
Andrew: Yeah, so to your point exactly. So that was our, that's our uh outturn on the NPS for candidates and for hiring managers it's plus 36, always a slightly harder audience to kind of get it right with. But to your point exactly, you know, that's already ticked up from what it was. And it's nudging on the door of 40. It'd be great if we could do that this year. And it's great. It's not brilliant, but it's great. And I think the team should be enormously proud of that because at the end of the day, it's six people plus a manager that delivers that experience consistently to every candidate and to every hiring manager. So I couldn't be more happy and proud with that shift.
So that combined with attrition. From a business perspective, less attrition means less hiring, which means less time spent by store managers having to bring new people into the business, and obviously it means that people are staying longer, which means that they're more productive over a longer period of time. So I think for me, those alone are huge wins for us as a total business and for our working relationship with the whole of the retail network.
Robert: Yeah, it's really exciting to hear that, Andrew, because I've come across lots of organisations that have that sort of volume hiring, very high attrition. And the assumption always is all we've got to be sourcing better or rather or finding some other means of targeting individuals who might be better suited to the role without really rethinking. Are we hiring for the right things? And then do we have a process that means that we are capturing what we need to capture.
Andrew: I think one of the other things, just to go back to your point about a metric, is how much less we spend on sourcing candidates up front. Because we were spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on a well-known job board. Because we just had to, we needed more candidates and we've actually reduced and reduced and reduced the amount of spend because we don't need as many candidates because we haven't got as many vacancies. We don't need as many candidates because we can get better quality through, in terms of operational expense, we've reduced that part of
Robert: That's really interesting. So the efficiencies...came in, you get that process right. And the efficiencies come in many different places that justify the transformation programme. So what's next then for you on this?
You've now done this transformation piece and I know with your energy and enthusiasm, it's always right, what more can we do? So have you, is this something that you feel that can be translated or have you already thought about or started doing in other parts of the business? Just kind of scrap the CV, let's redo the process.
Andrew: So, I mean, I think it's important just again, just to say that we started with a proof of concept in retail and grew it from there.
Robert: Okay, so it wasn't a
Andrew: we didn't do a big bang.
Robert: So, test, and check and it and then push out.
Andrew: Yeah and I think that's really important to anyone who's watching listening that if you're thinking about doing this don't try and do you know two and a half thousand shop retail network all in one go because you need to be able to kind of get that proof.
Robert: Test and learn first right.
Andrew: But having done all of that to answer your question about what next so yes it is absolutely able to be repeated in our customer care part of our business.
Robert: Okay so what does the customer care look like?
Andrew: So very geographically dispersed, it's never been harmonised in terms of one way of hiring. We have a lot of different entities and parts of customer care but I think there's we're working with a new leader who heads up customer care globally now. And she's so embracing of change, and when you've got a success story like the retail business and you can go, but it's kind of the same thing over here and she's really keen to look at that, it's kind of that acts as not really the foot in the door, but it's just like the door's wide open, come in and help me.
And so we're literally activating that next phase almost as we're speaking. And the early signs of that are incredibly encouraging. Pretty much a repeat of what I've shared with you. On the retail side, we did a trial out in India and some of the conversion on the number of people taking assessments, the number of people then completing the assessments, so it's in plus 70% of people.
This is in an Indian market where you know, the challenge of applicants per role is exactly the same as we've discussed in the UK on retail. So to then get 70% of those people actually sticking and going through the entire assessment and getting an outcome is a, I think is a real win. And that enables us to hire the best people from that process.
So the early signs of this are, you know, we've got candidate satisfaction in the 90 percents, you know, when they're asked if they're enjoying going through that process and what do they think about Entain as an employer as a result of taking that assessment. It's all incredibly high and it literally is a repeat and I wasn't quite expecting, if I'm honest, to get those numbers in a market like India as repeated if you like as we've seen it in the UK but it's worked incredibly well.
Robert: Well that's very encouraging so it shows that if you get that process right and just the principles and fundamentals it can cross into different geographies and locations. I imagine there has to be some local tweaking and or were there any different challenges?
Andrew: No, we've gone through the process again with the psychologist to make sure that everything is, you know, appropriate A for the role and B for the market. And there's been very few sort of needs for tweaking. Obviously, it's been tailored for the role and for the market. But it's not a big change. And we've been able to accelerate with all the lessons that we've learned with retail. We've also got the system built to handle all of the assessments coming in, the automation that sits in the system between the candidate taking it, the results coming
Robert: Right have the automation now to support
Andrew: What we're actually offering the customer care team is an enhanced product to the one that we went live with at the beginning of well in 2024 for retail. So we've learned all those lessons and we're able to now go well you can take advantage of you know the fully functioning, fully working version of that. So it's been so far it looks like it's a real success and we're looking at other areas of the business that could use that approach as well, particularly for entry level roles.
We're also looking at using assessment for our management roles in retail as well, which we haven't done before. Again, because it's behavioural based. It's really encouraging the way that the business is embraced doing something differently. It's been hard work, but it should be because it's a changing a a lot of the way that people think about things.
Robert: Well encouraging for people to know that you can take that approach, test and learn, you can use an opportunity like a change in ATS to introduce a new process as well. And even in a complex environment, you can make this kind of change.
And so just having gone through that transformation, what are the top tips then would you give somebody thinking about if they're having listened to this thinking, right, okay, I'm convinced now that this is something that I should be doing. What are your top two or three tips?
Andrew: I guess really understand what your the business that you're working with, know, really, I mean, really, don't sit in the centre and kind of go, it's customer care, it's this, go and understand it. Same as I described with retail, because I think if you can genuinely understand it and then combine it with real insights through whether it's psychologists or whether it's change agents, whatever process you're looking to run, I think that's one thing I would say is really, really important. Get close to your customer or a stakeholder.
I always say, build the plan, work the plan, deliver the plan. And I mean that really sincerely, which is don't do it in a half-baked way. Give your stakeholders the real security and comfort that you know what you're sitting out to do and that it's organised. And have those check-in points. And I think the third piece, if I'm allowed a third one.
Robert: You are indeed.
Andrew: Thank you very much. Would be the piece that I talked about around don't just see it as a one and done, don't see it as enabling the change and then letting it kind of go back into BAEU. Make the effort and take the opportunity to have those regular touch points with your stakeholders to kind of go, we're not just going to leave you on your own. And also the whole embed continuous improvement. You won't get it right first time. I think that might be for, but the kind of embed as a closed loop that getting the constant feedback and just constant tweaking and improving. And I think those are, for a big large scale transformation or big change that… we've talked about, those would probably be the, I mean, that super macro level, there's probably loads of little operational and, you know, kind of individual touch points. But I think those would be the three or four maybe that I've talked to.
Robert: Brilliant and great advice. And I love the last one too about the regular touch points in check and accepting that it can't be perfect first time around. You are going to make some mistakes, some things are going to work, some things aren't going to work but by accepting that and accepting responsibility and accountability for checking in and you you gave the example earlier of the monthly check-ins for hiring managers in there shows that you care about it you want to get the feedback from it as to how you can improve and ultimately that's what builds trust.
And at the end of the day what we're talking around a lot of this particularly when you're making something so dramatic is do I trust the person who's leading this the team that's going to deliver on this to actually follow through on what they said they were going to do rather than just walk away.
So, great advice and thank you so much for sharing all the experiences you've had and take on this. I'm sure many people will find it incredibly valuable as I have always listening to you, Andrew. So thank you for coming on to the podcast.
Andrew: You're very welcome and thank you for inviting me.
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Robert: Well, that was a great discussion and the three TA Disruptor tips.vI'm taking from Andrew and Entain’s story are first the scale of the impact of the change and the benefits that brought to the business. So typically people just think about, well, can we reduce attrition?
And that in itself is good, but when you follow through the benefits that Andrew outlined that were much more than that. So it wasn't just attrition, it was that he was able to do less sourcing, having to spend less money on job boards because he was getting better quality candidates faster and lasting longer in the business.
And I think another one that is often underappreciated in terms of benefits was the MPS scores of his team and hiring managers. And just to hear how much happier they were after this change gave me great encouragement about the value of scrapping the CV that you can not just do it but actually see a much better result in the business as a result.
The second thing that I really liked from Andrew on this was how he really personally and for his team invested in understanding what the key behaviors and attributes were that made would make somebody successful in a betting shop retail environment. The fact that he visited a shop and spent some really important time talking to hiring managers stakeholders, people who'd done the role to understand what those real signals were rather than just debating it over a job description.
And then the third bit was that his advice around test and learn, that a big bang approach here carries much greater risk. But if you can test and learn, get the metrics, from those initial pilots and then celebrate the successes. I really liked his hiring manager of the month celebration as well as the check-ins, but really celebrating those early pioneers and the success that they were achieving, which then built in itself its own momentum.
I hope you've enjoyed the podcast and this episode, and if you're thinking about a similar shift then please do reach out either to myself or Andrew via LinkedIn and please remember whether you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or watching on YouTube.
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