Coles Bulk Recruitment

Coles Recruitment in a Pandemic

A look behind the scenes

Industry

Retail

Company Size

115,000+ Employees

Objective

Bulk Recruitment Fast!

Solution

Traitify & Video Interviewing

5000%

Increase in Applications

48,000

Applications in 24 hours

10,000

Hires in under a month

95%

Reduction in time to hire

The Challenge

Coles is one of Australia’s largest and most iconic retailers, opening over 100 years ago as a variety store. Coles Group employ over 115,000 team members in its network of 816 supermarkets, 908 liquor stores, and 713 convenience outlets across the country.

Deemed an essential business during the COVID-19 pandemic, Coles played a vital role to the Australian community and wanted to find ways to best help Australians navigate this challenging time. This involved keeping stores open, hiring thousands of additional workers to meet demand and implementing a series of health precautions for the safety of both workers and customers, by ensuring that there was minimal physical interaction between candidates and recruiters.

Coles Group was aware that with unemployment on the rise, there would be a surge of applicants looking for work and that they needed to be prepared to properly screen and identify best-fit applicants.

Coles wanted to ensure that the proposed solution was not just for short term hiring but a long term process that would:

Reduce turnover
Increase productivity
Ensure compliance with government standards of hiring

Request Your Free Trial

The Solution

One Way Video Interviewing

Coles has been partnered with Testgrid since 2017, and over the length of this relationship has continually reviewed the candidate data to improve the solution together. To respond to the expected surge in applicants, one-way video interviewing was introduced. Coles was able to speed up the hiring process, while ensuring the safety of both Coles staff and candidates.

Traitify Personality Assessments

Testgrid worked with Coles to create an ‘ideal employee profile’ using an assessment tool called Traitify, a picture based behavioural assessment that takes just 2 minutes to complete.

This staged approach of: cognitive plus Traitfy assessments, and video interview allowed Coles to meet the surge in applicants using proven technology. The agility shown by Coles, Testgrid and the ATS provider allowed the solution to be set up in just 48 hours, and was key to being able to meet the immediate demands.

Simple People Analytics

Traitify makes the power of human insight accessible to create a new standard of connecting businesses, job seekers, and employees, helping them better understand themselves, their environments, and how to perform their best. The assessment provides powerful reporting capabilities that allow you to find the right people, with the right personalities for your business.

Request Your Free Trial

The Result

Set Up in 48 Hours

Coles saw a 5,000% increase in applications and 10,000 hires made in under a month allowed Coles to open new stores despite COVID circumstances, helping provide essential goods and services and allowing more employees to continue working and supporting their families.

With the help of Video Interviewing, the Coles recruitment process was cut down by 95% to 24-48hrs, from 15-20 business days. Coles was also able to ensure the highest level of safety by ensuring there was no physical interaction required between candidates and recruiters during the interviewing and assessment phase, which was critical to the process.

The Coles recruitment managers were happy with the candidate quality and even happier with the opportunity to review candidates at times it suited them. Candidate satisfaction remained high with candidates finding the process simple, intuitive, and most importantly, safe. This solution was driven by the immediate demand, but the success in the approach means that this has been adopted as the “new normal“.

“This recruitment tool is an effective and efficient mechanism to screen high volumes of candidates, ensuring we can easily identify those candidates that will provide the best customer experience across our Coles Group brands”

– Nina Pollard | National Head of Talent Acquisition, Coles Supermarkets