Refining the recruitment process with Ocado Group

Ocado Group is the fastest growing technology business in the FTSE 100. Its mission is to transform online grocery through cutting-edge technology and automation. Working with some of the world’s biggest, most innovative, and forward-thinking grocery retailers, Ocado Group helps them redefine their customers’ online shopping experience and be leaders in their markets.

It had to transform from retail to tech while helping grocery retailers redefine their online shopping experiences. It has adapted successfully, however, with a positive growth rate, it plans to recruit another 500 tech specialists at different levels of the business this year.

Here Henry Clendon, who leads talent strategy at Ocado Group, talks about how the firm has innovated to attract, select and retain top talent.

Defining the talent challenge

These changes require a talent strategy that can successfully cater for these new roles and strategies. For Ocado Group’s recruitment processes, it was vital to ensure the candidates with the right skills were identified and, more still, that individuals would be selected who wanted to and were able to grow alongside the company.

Specifically, these goals required the establishment of a hiring process that could attract, identify and select a diverse group of individuals who would be well-suited to the future of the business. Diversity was key in this new phase.

The firm previously found that its recruitment strategy restricted the kinds of candidates who would make it through to later recruitment stages, stifling the possibility of those with a good skill set but with lower academic credentials. Its system, for example, discounted those who didn’t have ABB results (or higher) from an established university. They realised that this was problematic for a company that increasingly needed diverse skills for a variety of roles and to create a future-ready workforce.

Embracing the benefits of innovation

The talent team knew they had to transform their graduate recruitment processes and started by removing academic qualifications from their search criteria and moving away from standard resume screening processes, traditional online verbal and numerical reasoning tests. Instead, they turned to behavioural qualities, enabling them to find candidates with traits such as adaptability, curiosity, learnability as well as the ability to embrace change; the qualities that are vital for Ocado Group’s current and future needs.

This new Emerging Talent Programme allowed for a talent transformation that not only promoted inclusivity in Ocado Group but gave them an edge over competitors – empowering them to find candidates who traditionally would be overlooked but actually provide new perspectives, fresh ideas, dynamism and bring with them a host of new possibilities for Ocado Group’s teams.

By using new technology to achieve these results, Ocado Group’s graduate recruitment process could also become a lot more engaging and reflective of the technology-focused business that it has transformed into. In turn, the completion rate of assessments was far higher, averaging at 80% across the pre-assessment day stages. Not only did this better support candidates throughout the process but it gave them a stronger understanding of the way the business would work before entering a role.

Artificial intelligence and the human touch

The new programme relied on artificial intelligence and digital assessment tools to help hiring managers identify diverse people and save time in the process. Working with Aon’s Assessment Solutions, they introduced a series of online assessments which worked to measure the preferred behaviours. A gamified cognitive test was also put in place to measure adaptability to change and working memory.

In later stages – for candidates who achieved higher scores – recorded video interviews were then introduced using the platform. For this, candidates uploaded a response to each question before the system analysed and scored their spoken words against the Group’s competencies.

In this process, AI mimics human raters by finding positive and negative behavioural indicators that can be linked to different personality traits. Like a human would, the AI technology then uses these indicators to give candidates a score for their answers but removes any human bias that could have been based on appearance, visual cues or speech tone.

For each of these steps, the entire process was automated and completed online which enabled a smooth operation for Ocado Group’s hiring teams and reduced the need for candidates to travel to test centres or interviews.

Securing support from the C-suite

Before this technology could be implemented, it was necessary to prove the return on investment and demonstrate how the processes would aid the wider company strategy.

After putting together the business case for the C-suite, the data was clear that the new system would save time and also make Ocado Group market leaders in using technology to drive their diversity and inclusion initiatives.

For Ocado Group’s diversity and inclusion recruitment initiatives, the benefits were also clear. There was hard evidence that the AI technology removed a large portion of unconscious bias from the process and could back up each of its decisions based on data. It was evident that the technology not only worked but was a perfect fit for the technology-based future of the organisation, using tech to make their own work more efficient.

After completing two recruitment cycles using this technology, hiring teams could track the diversity and inclusion performance within the hiring process and continually build the business case. Using data from the recruitment stages as well as Ocado Group-specific data on the diverse group of candidates who had entered the business and proved to be performing well, it was possible to substantiate the benefits and possibilities of the process to the C-suite.