G4S Australia and New Zealand is a business of around 2,000 employees looking after large prisons, correctional facilities, and providing security services for a wide range of blue-chip clients.
After adding 700 employees in 2021, they’re looking to hire around the same number in 2022, and they’re using Vervoe to achieve that goal.
Unique hiring challenges
The roles G4S is hiring for can be challenging to fill using conventional hiring techniques.
According to Richard Rushton, Head of the Talent Acquisition – ANZ, it’s hard to find good candidates for jobs like correctional officers on sites like SEEK or LinkedIn. They’re vocational roles drawing people from diverse backgrounds, and require a recruitment process less focused on directly-related experience.
“They can be coming from security environments. They can be coming from estate agents. They could be coming from nursing. They could be coming from administration style roles or customer service”, Richard says.
“The key thing there is trying to identify the skill-set rather than the CV of the person.”
Prior to Vervoe
Prior to using Vervoe, G4S’ hiring process was long and labor-intensive, screening CVs as a first step, making decisions based on instinct as to who would proceed to the next stage of the hiring process.
“We would literally screen the majority of the CVs,” Richard says.
“So that would be picking the phone up, having conversations with people, taking an educated guess in terms of if that skill-set would fit the role.”
But this overly hands-on, intuition-based process was time-consuming. It didn’t give candidates a chance to showcase their talent and forced hiring managers to use their unconscious bias to make decisions.
“Even a very solid kind of phone or video interview isn’t really measuring a skill-set,” says Richard.
Enter Vervoe
Now all candidates applying for a role complete a Vervoe skills assessment at the beginning of the process, giving everyone the opportunity to have their skills reviewed by the team — sometimes all the recruiters, sometimes just the hiring managers.
“What we’ve been able to do is actually articulate problems and have the candidates respond to certain, either, situations or questions around verbal, numerical and communication styles. Really bringing the opportunity to life at the same time for them,” Richard says.
“And this will let us have a better understanding of what their skill-set is rather than making a judgment on a piece of paper, or on a CV using our unconscious bias.”
Bringing Vervoe in early in the process, hiring managers can now see a candidate’s capability, rather than making a judgment based on gut feeling looking at their resume.
From there, the company brings the candidate into their assessment center so they can be viewed by the team.
“It’s been a really positive change for us,” says Richard.
Efficiency
Using Vervoe has allowed G4S to view a larger number of candidates.
In the past, with limited time on-hand, the recruitment function struggled to comprehensively look at the large volume of candidates who applied for roles. Now, every candidate who applies uses Vervoe and has the opportunity to be seen and assessed on their skills.
“We didn’t really have the capability and capacity to interview 600 people, so you have to make a judgment on them,” Richard says.
“Whereas Vervoe has opened that ability up for us and is a huge time-saving device for us as a recruitment function.”
Humanizing the process
A key strength of Vervoe for G4S is “humanizing the process”, according to Richard.
“With the lots of automated tools, you can take away the humanity element from it. What you can do with Vervoe is you can customize the candidate journey for people.”
G4S is using Vervoe to bring the company culture and brand to life for applicants, giving them a real-life sense of what it will be like to work at the organization.
“That you can have contract managers or hiring managers talking about their business unit is an opportunity, bringing it to life — that environment and the people they’re going to be working with — as well as looking at the skill-set at the same time,” Richard says.
“The two things go very well hand-in-hand in terms of the candidate experience.”
What makes Vervoe the right solution?
Vervoe’s growing library of pre-made assessments is a highlight for the G4S team, and something Richard sees as a selling point for clients.
“It’s not one size fits all for everything … Vervoe spent time tailoring a solution to us,” he says.
But, it’s Vervoe’s versatility and customer support that make it stand out, with each assessment specifically tailored to G4S’ needs.
“A lot of providers … can take a step away. Whereas they’re very keen, to work with you to make sure that the tools are very successful,” Richard says.
