How we helped to save Tarmac £1,000,000

I’m here to talk to you about how we helped transform Tarmac’s recruitment process, which in turn saved them more than one million pounds.

Now, we had quite an extensive brief from Tarmac, and what we try and do is distil it down into a Tweet to simplify it. What was the brief? We had to reduce their reliance on recruitment agencies, to reduce the cost and build Tarmac’s employer brand to help them retrain and attract the best possible talent. It was a very interesting brief.

I’m going to give you some context for those who don’t know who Tarmac are. Tarmac are owned by the second largest building manufacturer company in the world, and they’re one of the biggest players in the UK. These guys are involved in huge infrastructure projects that involve road, rail, air, they’re involved in Manchester City’s football stadium, they’re involved in The Shard, they could be involved in HS2, but they’re much more than this. They put people at the heart of their business, and I’m just going to play a quick video from their recruitment website, which gives you an idea of what it’s like to be involved and work at Tarmac.

[Video plays]

So, you can see from that video, that Tarmac are more than just solutions, they do genuinely put people at the heart of their business, and there’s some fantastic opportunities there. I know our team love going to see them – because of their gourmet kitchen that we take advantage of every time we’re up there! – but they are really a fantastic business to work for.

So, the brief came with several challenges. To name a few, Tarmac, before we were engaged on this project, worked with over 50 recruitment agencies. That is a lot of time spent with recruitment agencies, but also, if you’re a candidate and you’re communicating with an agency, they’re going to communicate your brand very, very differently and that journey’s going to be different for every single person that applies.

Now, assets. They didn’t have a recruitment platform, they didn’t have technology, so they didn’t have an applicant tracking system to track where all of these candidates are coming from. But more than that, it would need a big cultural shift, because every time they had a vacancy, the go-to thing was just engage one of these agencies. And they had many, many people that handed in their CVs internally as well, many HR managers. So, significant challenges.

Now, to talk to you about the solution, one of the obvious things is, they needed a recruitment platform. They needed their own recruitment website that told people just what it was like to work at Tarmac, all of the benefits, all of the opportunities there. They partnered with an agency called Connect, in the Midlands, they’ve done a fantastic job of building them this platform, and we consulted along the process. They also needed an applicant tracking system, so this system would tell you how many CVs for what roles, it could manage their whole process for them, so this was a very, very important part of the project.

Where RocketMill come in, particularly that was really important, is there’s many, many platforms out there that do a fantastic job of driving new candidates. These are just two to name examples: Indeed, LinkedIn, there’s other major companies like Reed, etc. that can do this. Should we start looking at optimising their site to start ranking for jobs and compete with these major players? Or should we utilise them? So, one of the things that RocketMill, that we got involved with, was optimising their data feeds, to easily optimise for these platforms.

And they liked the data in slightly different ways, so we talked about them engaging over 50 agencies, one of the rules that we actually put in place was that all CVs must be on the applicant tracking system for two weeks before you could engage an agency. This allowed us to own the real estate of those platforms, and properly optimise them. It also allowed us to do things like on Indeed, for important jobs that we know are critical, we could programmatically bid on those jobs, so we can get a lot more applicants and candidates in very, very quickly, which was really important.

And above that, we use a visualisation platform, called Power BI. Essentially, it can integrate with loads of different data points, and visualise data. Now what we’ve done for Tarmac is, if you imagine that every time someone applies for a job, you can see, where did they come from, so what source? We can also see, did they get an interview? Did they get the job? Did they pass the probation? What salary bracket was it? Was it one to seven? Is it a critical job? There’s many different things that we can see, and we can actually track this and visualise it in dashboards.

So I’m just going to give you an example, with dummy data, of what these Dashboards look like. You can break it down by each different business segment within Tarmac, we can see how many CVs they’ve got, the jobs that…so typically, what type of jobs work well from the website, from job boards, what might be more office based jobs and work with different platforms. So it allows us to see exactly where it works.

I’ll give you a little bit of an example. Imagine, Tarmac are engaged on the HS2, for example. They need a lot of drivers to fulfil that project. If, for whatever reason they’re short of drivers – which is really critical – it could cost them millions. So, it’s really important, from historic data, from the use of Power BI, understanding where, for drivers, so what agencies in the past…produced them the most drivers, the most successful candidates, but also, what platforms? For example, if we find out that Indeed’s very good for that, and we can programmatically bid on that, it can allow us to fulfil that role very, very quickly, and save them a significant amount of money.

In short, our role was, making it very easy, one you upload a CV to automate, applicants go along various different platforms to drive more CVs, but also understanding data so every single HR manager understands within their remit, exactly what’s going on with all of their candidates, and where they get the most successful candidates.

The outcome was significant. They spent around two million pounds in 2015, just on full time recruitment fees with those 50 agencies plus. Significant amount of money. Since the launch of the new career site and the ATS in February 2016, we’ve helped save them more than a million pounds in recruitment fees, and that’s excluding temp recruitment fees. A significant amount of money.

And just to round things off, here’s a testimonial from Craig who works in the marketing team. We’ve worked with Craig for over two years, we’ve worked with him on this project, which is an ongoing project, but we’re also working with him on the UX project for the commercial site.

Thank you very much.