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The pace of change in recruiting technology continues to accelerate, and with it come opportunities to improve hiring outcomes, streamline operational efficiency, and make much-needed improvements to the candidate experience. When you add in increasing volumes of applications driven by candidate use of AI and the differing wants and needs of a new generation entering the workforce, it becomes evident that we are on the brink of a profound transformation in recruiting processes.
So, what are the most forward-thinking companies already doing? My guest this week is Hollie Powell, Recruitment Business Partner at EDF. EDF is reinventing its recruiting process for early careers and improving the candidate experience by carefully balancing technology and automation with high-quality human interaction.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The early careers strategy at EDF
• Increasing volumes of applications through candidate use of AI
• How EDF is evolving its recruiting process
• The enormous benefits of effective video interviewing
• Speeding up the process to improve the candidate experience
• Ensuring high quality human interaction during the process
• Using an organization wide strengths-based framework
• Keeping up with changing candidate wants and needs
• Planning for the skills shortages of the future
• Consumer brand versus employer brand
• How will early careers evolve in the coming years?
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Matt: Support for this podcast is provided by Willo, a video interviewing platform for scaling businesses. As the talent market evolves, you are probably thinking about how to build a more inclusive candidate experience that doesn’t require long days on Zoom, Teams, or Skype. Willo is a virtual interviewing platform where candidates can record responses on their own time using video, audio, or text. And it’s used by some of the fastest-growing businesses like Coinbase, Hotjar, and HelloFresh. Willo’s flexible platform means candidates can truly be themselves and recruiters get a consistent transparent process.
It’s also excellent for the candidate experience. 35% of candidates interview with Willo between the hours of 06:00 PM and 06:00 AM. Willo also integrates seamlessly with over 5,000 business applications such as Workday, Workable, Lever, Greenhouse, and Teamtailor. There’s a free trial to try everything and if you need more Willo’s tailored plans include features to help you expand your talent pool and streamline recruiting operations. All with 24/7 live support. Request a personalized demo today at willo.video, that’s willo.video.
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Matt: Hi, there. Welcome to Episode 614 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. The pace of change in recruiting technology continues to accelerate and with it comes the opportunities to get better hiring outcomes, streamline operational efficiency, and make much needed improvements to the candidate experience. When you add in increasing volumes of applications driven by candidate use of AI and the differing wants and needs of a new generation entering the workforce, it becomes evident that we’re on the brink of a profound transformation in recruiting processes. So, what are the most forward-thinking companies already doing? My guest this week is Hollie Powell, Recruitment Business Partner at EDF. EDF is reinventing its recruiting processes for early careers and improving the candidate experience by carefully balancing technology and automation with high quality human interaction.
Hi Hollie, and welcome to the podcast.
Hollie: Hi Matt, thank you so much for having me.
Matt: It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Hollie: Of course. So, I’m currently the Recruitment Business Partner at EDF. So, I have the wonderful job of recruiting our apprentices, graduates, and industrial placements. We take on between 350 and 400 as both candidates a year, so we’re never short of a challenge and always busy.
Matt: I can imagine. And thank you for finding the time to talk to me. Tell us a little bit more about your business, about your early career strategy and the rationale behind it.
Hollie: Yeah, for sure. So, we are building two nuclear power stations at the moment and I think we’re very well aware that we do have to scale those gaps. And basically, the reason that we recruit so many early career candidates is mainly because we need to essentially future proof ourselves. So, when the nuclear power stations get up and running, we need to ensure that we’ve got the right people in the right place at the right time. And I think, I suppose a bit of a misconception about EDF is that we’re just nuclear. Yes, we’re a nuclear business, but we do operate in the corporate spaces as well. So, we’ve got loads of early career schemes and apprenticeship schemes that run across, you know solicitors, legal, and we’ve got loads of renewables placements as well. So, like I said, basically future proofing ourselves and getting our brand out there a lot more.
Matt: And what’s this split between graduates and apprentices?
Hollie: As it stands at the moment, we’re pretty evenly split. So, as it stands, I checked yesterday, we’re recruiting about 382 this year and we’re pretty much about 125, 130 in each of our streams, like I said, which is graduates, industrial placements and apprenticeships. So, we tend to be quite even and previous years, we’ve been more graduate heavy than we have apprenticeship heavy, but this year we’ve had loads of new schemes, we’ve got some really exciting schemes and because we’re very well aware that we need to train our people early and apprenticeships are a perfect route for us to be able to do that.
Matt: I suppose, for people listening who don’t have much experience in early careers. What’s the difference between recruiting apprentices and recruiting graduates.
Hollie: I think with graduates, what I tend to see with graduates is that they’re very sure of what they want. So, graduates obviously have been to university. A lot of the candidates that we see have done masters, if I use renewable energy as an example, they may have studied mechanical engineering and then gone into specifically renewables engineering for their masters, so they’re very, very certain with what they want to do. Apprentices, we don’t see that as much because our apprenticeships are so varied. So, for example, we have degree-level apprenticeships. So, we’re running a chemistry degree-level apprenticeship this year, a nuclear engineering degree-level apprenticeship and our solicitor apprenticeship, that it probably speaks to some more of the candidates that are a little bit sure of what they want to do.
So what we tend to see is quite a lot of candidates will apply to us and they might apply for a specific scheme but we might say to them, “Actually, you might be better suited into a different space.” I suppose that the actual recruitment of apprenticeships and graduates, they follow the same process. That’s quite straightforward process and there’s no major differences there. But it’s the attraction, I think, where we have the massive difference, especially with apprentices, our target audience isn’t just the apprentices themselves, it’s the schools and colleges that they attend. It’s the parents that we need to attract as well. With graduates, like I said, “It just tends to be a little bit more straightforward.”
Matt: I want to dig into your process and maybe how it’s changed in a second. Before I do though, a lot of the things that have struck me with the conversations I’ve had with people running graduate schemes or apprenticeship schemes at the moment is they’ve seen a massive increase in applications over the last 18 months or so, which people are putting down to the candidates using AI to help them with their applications and to be able to do them quicker. Is that something that you’re seeing?
Hollie: Absolutely. I’m chuckling to myself because at the very start of the process, it was absolutely baffling me. We were absolutely inundated with applications, but very similar to you, I’ve had conversations about it. So, just to kind of put it into perspective, we had circa 17,000 applications in our last cycle, which was September 2022 to September 2023, and that was across all graduates, all industrial placements and apprenticeships. This year we’re only midway through the cycle and we’ve just hit 24,000. And yeah, numbers are absolutely insane. In fairness, we do have to put that down a little bit to the fact that we’ve opened a lot more schemes this year. We’ve opened schemes that we hadn’t had last year, so it can’t be a direct comparison. But, yeah, we’re definitely seeing a lot more usage of AI, not only at the very front end of the application stage, but completely throughout the process as well.
Matt: Tell us a little bit more about that. What are people using it for that you can see?
Hollie: Good. We’ve got absolutely no proof to this. We operate a situational judgment test of sorts. It’s not a traditional SJT and we suspect that there are candidates that are using it for the testing and definitely at video interview stage. So, I recently did a couple of video interviews, marked a couple of them, and everybody have the same answer. And I was like, “Are they all at the same uni–?” But no, they were using ChatGPT. And I suppose you can see the candidates reading off it and you can see when it’s a bit of a less authentic answer than if they were just kind of answering it naturally without using AI.
Matt: You’d recently changed your process anyway, so tell us about the process changes that you’ve made and perhaps how they’re helping you with the situation that’s kind of happening now.
Hollie: Yeah, sure. So, I suppose the biggest change for us from last cycle to this cycle is the use of video interview. So previously we did telephone interviews. One of the key things that we were noticing is that we were booking in telephone interviews with candidates and they might not arrive or they might reschedule, and then we’ve lost that time. Whereas with our video interviews, we’re getting some great feedback not only from our team, but also the candidates as well, because they can do them in their own time. You now if they’re in a time difference, for example, they can do them in the middle of the night for the UK, but it might be middle of the day for them. And when we were doing telephone interviews, we weren’t able to offer that level of flexibility.
And from a resource perspective, we’ve worked out that it saves us around 40 minutes per candidate. And when you’ve got, 24.000 applications, it’s a lot of time saving and that’s been absolutely amazing. As we kind of get further into the process, we’ve made quite a few changes to our assessment centers, but equally our advertising as well. So previously we used to advertise for two months. We’ve just started advertising for a month, which is saving us so much time when it comes to getting the candidates through the process, but also, it’s increased our candidate experience because if they applied for a role on the very first day that the applications opened, our assessment centers are probably usually circa six, seven, eight weeks after the application closes.
Those candidates could be waiting for three months before they get told if they’re going to assessment center or not. So, we’ve managed to really reduce that, which has been fantastic. We’ve had some great feedback from that and also our assessment centers as well. So, we’ve recently introduced a meet the grads or apprentice session where the candidates have got 30 minutes with a previous grad or an apprentice, it’s unmarked, there’s no assessors in there and they can just ask the nitty gritty questions. For example, “What do I wear to work? What day do I get paid? What projects have you completed?” which has been fantastic.
And I suppose finally, the last thing that we’re just in the process of implementing at the moment is a call a week before the assessment centers with the candidates. So they’ve got, I suppose, a week to kind of fully get a little bit more comfortable with our process because of the volumes we deal with, we very much use the video interview platform and our testing platform. And up until that point, they’ve not really seen anybody at EDF, they’ve not seen a friendly face or kind of spoken to a human. So, we wanted to add that element into it and get them more familiar and get them more comfortable, because it must be so daunting for them to rock up to a business of our size. And it always remains our top priority is candidate experience. And then the second piece is process efficiency, improvement, and supporting our team to make sure that they’ve got enough headspace and capacity to deal with what we’ve got coming in.
Matt: It sounds like a great balance between giving that great candidate experience by responding quickly, but doing that in a way that works well with your resources, but then also having that big human element in the process as well. How do all the stages fit together? So there’s a test, there’s an interview, there’s a video interview, there’s an assessment. How does that all fit together?
Hollie: Yeah. So, the very first stage of the process, obviously, is the candidate application. We do request a CV at the moment and we do an application SIFT based on the degree discipline for graduates and industrial placements, and then also apprentices, their GCSE’s or their qualifications. If successful at that point, they then move on to testing. So, our graduates do, like I say, an SJT of sorts and an ability test, and our apprentices do just the SJT. So, we operate a strength-based framework that is the same across our organization. We’ve worked really hard with the business and ourselves to make sure that we’re recruiting the right strengths. They then move on to a video interview, which again is strengths based. If successful, they will move to assessment center, where we do group exercises, one to one exercise, sometimes a presentation, sometimes just a kind of straightforward interview. And again, something that we’re really keen on is to get offers out the door very quickly because we are seeing a lot of candidates renege at the very kind of last end. So, we want to make sure that the process is as quick as we can possibly make it for them.
Matt: In terms of how you change the process you kind of went through a process to find a video interview provider. Tell us about that process and what is it that makes a good provider in this kind of application scenario?
Hollie: Sure. So, we had a video interview provider before we changed to Willo. We have, within the early career’s recruitment team, there’s probably about seven people that get involved in the video interviews. And our previous platform didn’t allow for us to have more than one person in the same kind of pot at the same time. So went out to market and we had Willo recommended to us by quite a few different people. And for me, the biggest thing was ease of use and how quickly our recruitment team could pick it up. But equally, the candidate experience as well, like, “How easy is it for the candidates to use? How easy is it for us to use?” We’ve had just incredible customer service from them. We’ve got our customer success. Manager Faith is absolutely fantastic. She’s always checking in, “How are you? How are you using the system?”
And I think something that I suppose is super unique about it is that we, A, we constantly have those check-ins. B, we are constantly contacted by the product team to be like, “Hey, if we change this, would it work for you? What do you think of this?” So we, not only are we a customer, but we also feel like we’re kind of involved in shaping the platform, which I think is absolutely incredible and we love it.
Matt: You sort of mentioned at the beginning about the issues with finding the skills that you need. There’s always a lot of talk about STEM based careers and what the education system and the government are doing in terms of providing a pipeline of talent for the future. What’s it like from the perspective of your business? I mean, how are you planning for the future? What do you see happening? Do you think that these skill shortages are going to continue? What’s your kind of role as an organization in terms of moving forward?
Hollie: We as an organization know the skills that we need, so we need to be fostering those very early on. I think we have a massive responsibility as an employer to A, not only– we’re in a unique situation, right? Because we’ve got an incredible consumer brand, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into, A, a brand that apprentices might think, “Yeah, I’m going to go work for EDF because they’re fantastic.” So, we not only need to kind of translate that. We also need to make people aware that there are different types of skills that we need. You know, if we put into the nuclear industry, and I’m not just talking about solely EDF here, if we put into the nuclear industry, then we will get something out of that in the future. I went to a talk yesterday, which was absolutely fantastic.
It was the In-house Recruitment Early Careers Conference and a lot of what was talked about and was about that showing and telling that having those real employee stories, our apprentices and grads have gone on to do some really, really amazing stuff.” So, to be able to translate that into the outside world, I think is absolutely vital. But like I said, we can’t put all of the onus on the government in schools because they don’t know what’s out there either. So, it’s all the education piece.
Matt: There’s a final question for you. Obviously, recruiting in general is going for a bit of a transformation at the moment, but particularly early careers is obviously continually developing in terms of sort of process and strategy. What do you think the future looks like for early careers recruiting? How much do you think it might change over the next few years?
Hollie: What question? I think it’s going to change massively, given the fact that our candidates are going to change massively. We’re moving out of [unintelligible 00:17:42] candidates now and we move into different generations that require different things from us. So, I think at least attraction will change massively, and also the skills that we’re going to get will change massively as well. What we’ve got to remember is that a lot of these candidates that we’re seeing went through university, college, school, during COVID, they’ve got a very, very different view of the world than the previous generation. So, I think we just have to keep up with that. The younger generation, definitely have a lot more different skills than perhaps older generations and vice versa.
So, I suppose it’s kind of merging the two, finding that sweet spot and finding where different generations can support each other. But I think, yeah, early careers is going to change even in the two years that I’ve been working with the early careers team at EDF, we’ve seen some massive changes and I think it’s just going to keep going. The one thing that I think businesses need to do is keep up with that and keep up with what candidates want and equally what they need.
Matt: Hollie, thank you very much for talking to me.
Hollie: Thank you so much for your time. It’s been really enjoyable. I’ve really enjoyed it.
Matt: My thanks to Hollie. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also subscribe to our YouTube channel by going to mattalder.tv. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
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