Revitalising Recruitment: Transforming Talent Acquisition at Staffordshire County Council – Staffordshire County Council (SCC) and Tribepad

Struggling with wide skills shortages and rising cost pressures, SCC had a strong case for urgent action on candidate experience and employer brand because these hiring challenges were only getting worse. “Poor candidate experience meant we were losing control over our brand, which was then having a knock-on impact on applications,” SCC said.

First, SCC conducted an internal and external review to understand where improvements were needed. Then, transformed from a messy, patchy candidate journey, SCC’s employer brand and candidate experience were revitalised and improved through creating a new in-house recruitment team of 11, bringing onboarding in-house and improving reporting visibility, which empowered continuous improvement to recruitment processes and candidate experience. Bringing new technology onboard made massive improvements to the candidate experience through one-click apply and mobile-first candidate service with new recruitment software, automatic communications and status notifications, mobile-friendly manager portal, and many other developments.

The transformation’s results have been impressive. SCC scored 8.5/10 for candidate experience on a recent survey, for instance.

Among the changes that have made a marked difference were candidate rejection communications with templates for common feedback reasons, managers having one-to-one feedback calls with unsuccessful interviewing candidates, every interviewing candidate offered detailed feedback if they want it, regular candidate and new hire satisfaction surveys, to give candidates an opportunity to share their own feedback and feel heard. 

Judges’ comments

The winning entry “provided both tangible evidence of the impact of the brand development initiative and that the candidate experience was being considered in its widest sense – notable in their articulation of the understanding of the fact that unsuccessful candidates have the greatest impact on employer brand”.