StepStone's E-Recruitment Solution relieves WHSmith’s store managers of heavy recruitment burden

Business challenge

With a prevalence of seasonal jobs and high staff turnover rates in retail, efficient recruitment is important for WHSmith‘s 750+ store managers. Relying on manual, paper-based processes meant that recruitment was taking up too much of their time.

Solution

StepStone‘s e-recruitment solution delivers a single online application system and automates many steps in the recruitment process, including initial screening of applications, scheduling of interviews and all correspondence with rejected and successful candidates.

Results

Store managers spend less time on administrative recruitment tasks and can quickly fill vacancies with the right people. Candidates have the kind of smooth, professional interaction they expect

from WHSmith.

The Business

WHSmith is a household name in the UK as an outlet for books, stationery and newspapers. It has more than 560 high-street stores; almost 500 travel outlets at airports, railway stations, hospitals and motorway service areas; and an online store. On average more than 1.2 million people visit a WHSmith outlet every day of the year. Most of the company‘s 17,000 staff were customers before they became employees.

The Challenge

Retail has a prevalence of seasonal jobs and high staff turnover rates. For WHSmith this translated into hiring 6-10,000 people every year across its stores. The responsibility for this activity fell to store managers, who had to manage recruitment with manual processes. “Picture the process,“ says Anthony Lawrence, the company‘s HR director. “Having posted a vacancy there‘s nothing to help managers to screen the many responses they get. They have to manually send a reply to each respondent. They have to schedule interviews. Then there‘s a second round of letters after interview and so on.“This time-consuming process made it harder than it needed to be for store managers to ensure that candidates came away from the recruitment process with a good impression of WHSmith.Anthony Lawrence knew that the right enterprise recruitment system could automate much of what the store managers were doing manually, saving them a lot of time and giving candidates a more professional experience.

The Solution

When assessing solutions the two most important selection criteria for Anthony Lawrence were a track record in the distributed retail environment and the flexibility to evolve to meet WHSmith‘s future needs. StepStone‘s end-to-end e-recruitment solution came out ahead on both scores.“Several large retailers were using the StepStone solution and were clearly happy with it. The functionality, user-friendliness and flexibility of the solution matched our needs very well. We were also impressed by the ethic of partnership with customers that StepStone displayed.“The first phase of implementation was to roll out the solution to WHSmith‘s three corporate offices. Anthony Lawrence wanted the company‘s small HR team to become familiar enough with the system to be able to support the stores when they started using it. A key step in implementing the overall solution was to overhaul WHSmith‘s recruitment website, which became powered by the StepStone e-recruitment solution. This was vital because the company had taken the strategic decision to accept only online applications once the e-recruitment solution was in place.

The Results

Early results of the roll-out in stores indicate that the StepStone e-recruitment solution is saving time for store managers at every step of the recruitment process. They don‘t have to look through as many unsuitable applications because the system does some initial screening for them. Job adverts direct candidates to the online recruitment site where they answer initial qualification questions. If a candidate doesn‘t meet the minimum requirements they receive an automatically generated rejection letter. Store managers are also saving time by letting the system schedule interviews and generate all correspondence with candidates. Internal processes, such as getting approvals from an area manager or getting references checked, are also more efficient now that they‘re done electronically.