CUSTOMER STORY
Australia Post Cuts Casual Hiring Backfills From 7% to 3% With Skills-Based Assessment
Australia Post + Vervoe
Every Peak Period, Australia Post hires 2,500+ casual staff to keep its delivery network running and needs them ready to perform from day one. Here’s how moving from gut-feel screening to role-based assessment with Vervoe cut backfills by more than half.
RESULTS AT A GLANCE
3%
From 7% to 3%
Backfill rate, same period year over year
~17,500
Hours of phone screening removed from peak recruitment
20%+
Casual hires retained into permanent roles
About Australia Post
Australia Post is a transport and logistics company headquartered in Melbourne, delivering postal, retail, financial, and travel services to more than 11.9 million Australian addresses and 190+ countries. Every Peak Period (August to January), it hires 2,500+ casual staff to keep its delivery network running, and more than 20% of them go on to permanent roles.
QUICK FACTS
- Industry
- Transport & Logistics
- Headquarters
- Melbourne, Australia
- Employees
- ~35,000
- Casual hires per Peak Period
- 2,500+
- Applicants assessed per year
- 10,000+
The challenge
Casual staff arrive at the busiest time of year and need to be productive almost immediately, with no runway to ramp up. By 2018, hiring managers and business leaders across Australia Post’s facilities were flagging a pattern: some casual hires weren’t a fit for the role’s pace, safety requirements, or team environment, and that showed up directly in facility efficiency and customer experience. The stakes went beyond one season. With a fifth of casuals moving into permanent jobs, a hiring miss at the casual stage became a retention problem a year later.
We identified that we wanted to improve the quality and reliability of our casuals.
The approach
Australia Post started with the job, not a generic test. The team interviewed hiring managers, business leaders, and top-performing casuals across five facilities to find what actually separated strong performers from the rest, landing on four competencies: safety mindset, attention to detail, collaboration, and resilience. Vervoe was trialed first in call center recruitment, then rolled out across other Talent Acquisition streams. Candidates work through video, text, multiple-choice, and timed questions built around those four competencies, graded automatically.
The results
Backfill rate fell from 7% to 3%. Comparing the same period year over year, fewer casual hires needed replacing partway through the season.
Candidate dropout fell from 41% to 28%. Fewer candidates dropped out along the way.
Better quality of hire. Hiring managers described new starters as more reliable, attentive, and engaged from day one.
More time with qualified candidates. The team spent less time screening out people who were never going to be a fit.
Phone screening removed from peak recruitment. Roughly 17,500 hours of phone screening were removed from peak period recruitment.
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