HR Distinction Spotlight: Establishing a talent attraction strategy

Many organisations strive to go through a transformational journey and guarantee global success. To overcome these challenges, businesses must undertake numerous changes over many years. This can heavily impact culture, talent, and strategic focus.

Through these monumental changes, HR plays a key role in maintaining and aligning a consistent experience for their workforce in times of uncertainty. This week, we look at Reward Gateway’s talent journey. They set out to redesign their talent attraction strategy and create a more engaging and focused workforce.

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Reward Gateway hire in five different countries, which involves hiring multiple candidates from completely different demographical backgrounds. As a high growth company, Reward Gateway is always upscaling to meet the plans of their next PE investment. It is crucial to ensure that they are continually building talent pipelines, to have a solid foundation when looking to attract and develop talent across the five countries that they operate in.

In the world of HR, Reward Gateway is famous for its exceptional employee experience strategies – however, not so much for talent attraction. Therefore, the organisation planned to create a world-class candidate experience, where employees felt engaged and inspired.

Their strategy was split into 5 main goals:

• Hire dedicated recruiters in each market, who focus on building talent communities and offering an exceptional candidate experience.
• Utilise feedback as a beacon of how they reinvent their workspace.
• Deliver a world-class candidate and onboarding experience.
• Strategically invest in tools to ensure effective hiring can help make better decisions.
• Become an inclusive employer of choice and diversify their workforce.

To ensure they attracted a diverse pool of talent, Reward Gateway ran its job adverts through a gender-neutral platform. They additionally advertised on D&I specific job boards, such as Vercida, and Workingmums.com. The business began to use recruitment tools to further enhance its talent attraction strategy.

“The implementation of a new Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) has enabled us to build better talent communities, and improve how we report our data to managers,” said Gemma Matthews, Head of Talent Acquisition, Reward Gateway.

“We introduced Enboarder, an onboarding tool that creates a powerful onboarding experience for new hires and managers.”

“It creates a new onboarding experience, which makes it easy for managers to connect with new hires from the moment they accept our offer, through to week four of their new role.”

Reward Gateway reshaped its global employee programme, to encourage workers to recommend talent to join their mission. They recently launched an external referral programme in the UK to support their Engineering and Sales growth.

The global organisation also revamped its interview process. They now have clear stages for each role, which allowed them to manage candidate expectations more effectively, attract talent faster, and provide an engaging experience.

There has been a plethora of positive results from making these monumental changes.

“We had positive feedback from our employees,” continued Gemma.

“We have been rated 4.78 out of 5 from our new employees based on their onboarding journey and have received really valuable feedback on how to make the experience even better.”

As a result of their focus on gender-neutral adverts, 52% of Reward Gateway’s workforce globally are now women. In 2018 they also doubled their UK sales team, with internal referrals accounting for 45% of the hires.

“The initiatives that focused on diversifying our talent attraction have led to an increase in BAME employees, from 15% in 2014 to 40% in 2018″ continued Gemma.

Only three years ago, Reward Gateway had no recruitment team, and there wasn’t a process in place to focus on candidate experience or talent attraction. The journey that the new team has been on required determination, hard work, and passion.

These traits were adopted throughout the whole business, which created an enjoyable and productive workplace. From the moment a candidate is brought on a journey with Reward Gateway, they feel part of a focused and engaged extended family.

“All 423 Reward Gateway employees do their jobs with pride and passion,” said Gemma.

“We can be proud of everything that we have achieved in the past few years. We know we are not perfect, but with our constant influx of feedback, we are excited about improving and expanding.”

There are countless benefits for companies that dedicate time and resources into an effective candidate experience strategy. Companies that choose to follow new global talent trends could see a similar progression in the dynamic talent market.