Delivering a great journey to customers is crucial to Greater Anglia Train Service. Unfortunately, the candidate journey didn’t meet the same level.
Following a full review of their attraction, recruitment, on-boarding and induction processes, we found that there were so many opportunities to deliver a seamless experience for every candidate.
In implementing HARBOUR, Greater Anglia achieved 0% dropout during the Onboarding process
With a need to recruit 200-300 new high quality hires every year, Greater Anglia needed to place a high emphasis on recruiting new people that were only great at what they do, but had already bought into the business, were keen to get started and were a great culture fit. So, it made sense to ensure that once someone had accepted a role, they could continue that fantastic candidate experience through their on-boarding, induction and new starter process.
Delivering a single candidate-focused approach to getting the right people into the right jobs in the most enjoyable and effective way possible was crucial. Using technology, events and one-to-one contact ensured that everyone joining Greater Anglia was always fully informed, engaged and made to feel at home.
The whole process took nine months to implement with many members of the Great Anglia team working weekends to deliver it. Because as a team they knew that we wanted to put something in place that would make a significant difference to our business. And what a difference it has made!
Since the launch of the new candidate experience, Greater Anglia have received over 12,500 applications. Of these, 260 were successful, hired and invited to join the OnBoarding process. And even at the beginning of this change process they already saw some pretty impressive results and the feedback from candidates was better than anticipated.
From online chat to online assessments, everything that has been created is focused on the experience that every candidate will have. We were always conscious that delivering a fantastic experience to both successful and non successful applicants was really important. Not everyone can get the job, but everyone can be treated with respect and decency.
Getting the right information to the right people at the right time is crucial for any successful OnBoarding programme. The Greater Anglia system ensured that every form that a candidate needed to complete was automatically sent to the relevant department so they could prepare everything for day one. What uniform they need, where they need to be and what they need to bring with them. It’s simple and very human.
Candidates were very positive about the speed and clarity of the process. The seamless integration between the application system, the online assessment process and the onboarding website was particularly popular. As even though in reality they are powered by a number of different platforms, from a candidate’s point of view it’s just one single journey.