Skanska UK – Automation in Recruitment

Increasing the number of annual offers to talent pool members by more than 10 times in a six-month period and cutting average time-to-hire in half from 85 days to 42, also within half a year – these are among the achievements that Skanska UK’s recruitment team earned by rewriting and automating their recruitment processes.

In 2021, Skanska UK embarked on a journey to revolutionise its end-to-end recruitment cycle. This involved implementing a new, UK-specific applicant tracking system (ATS) and rewriting its recruitment processes, separate from the company’s head office in Sweden.

“We were able to identify manual candidate movement, manual trackers and pain points which were overly cumbersome, and procure and implement a system which would alleviate these,” Skanska UK said.

“Through automatic and streamlining of processes, we were able to create a better candidate experience and improve efficiency within the HR department. Contracts and ‘new starter’ forms were automated, manufal data entry and uploading removed, and a seamless automated emerging talent workflow implemented.”

In the new system, the candidate moves from application through two rounds of psychometric testing automatically to a video interview. “Only once they have completed the video interview will the recruiter review the application,” Skanska UK said.

And their learnings can be applied across recruitment: “Large global organisations like us [Skanska] are often constrained by a group-wide system…This is often at the expense of functionality, local customizability and in turn, user experience.”

Localisation can make recruiting teams more efficient. By putting to work “local systems fine-tuned to the market, key metrics such as time to hire, talent pool fill rates and diversity reporting can be dramatically improved”, Skanska UK said.