Tomorrow’s Talent – Sky in partnership with Cappfinity

Sky is Europe’s leading direct-to-consumer media and entertainment company, with more than 30,000 employees in seven countries. The Early Careers Team delivers programmes for key corporate, content, customer and technology roles, with around 250 hires per year, and offers thousands more opportunities through insight days and weeks. They have a strong commitment to young people.

  • For the 2019-20 campaign, the early talent assessment strategy was redesigned with a focus on future workforce requirements, on improving the diversity of underrepresented talent, and on candidate engagement.
  • All candidates, successful and unsuccessful, are provided with personalised feedback at each stage of the process. These detail the top three strengths the candidate has shown within that assessment, and give advice on how they can stretch them further.
  • All candidates who start the process are invited to complete an anonymous, specialised candidate feedback survey. A perception survey is also included at the end of the assessment. Candidates are also asked open questions to gather qualitative as well as quantitative feedback and allow them to share additional thoughts on the assessments.
  • 95% of candidates who went through Sky’s recruitment process reported that they had received enough information while they were undergoing the experience in a survey by Group GTI – which focuses on matching students with employers and vice versa. GTI regularly surveys candidates across the industry about their experiences of applying to graduate schemes: of the 1,000 candidates who completed surveys in 2019, only 54% said they had received enough information during the recruitment process, compared with Sky’s sky-high 95%.
  • Sky is committed to bringing more people from diverse backgrounds to the organisation, and there was a recognition that the company needed to scale and redesign its approaches to fulfil its future skill and leader requirements.

Judges’ comments: The multiple outreach into local communities with a focus upon social mobility and equality, diversity and inclusion achieved fantastic results. Candidate experience was immersive, digital and personal.”

Also: The judges remarked that most notably for an experience category, the winner was supported by positive testimonials from unsuccessful candidates: given that recruitment is in the rejection business, this is a key component of experience that is often overlooked.

HIGHLY COMMENDED

Network Rail signalling experience – Network Rail in partnership with Bavarde