Customer story - Boots

Boots is using Jobpartners’ ActiveRecruiter solution to streamline its recruitment process and to ensure effective people relationship management

Boots employs around 68,000 people and sells its products in 130 countries. As one of the most well-known retailers in the UK and Ireland, ensuring a consistent and strong employer brand, and attracting and retaining hot talent is critical.

Rolling out country wide recruitment campaigns

With a diverse range of skill requirements from pharmacists, to store managers, to marketing and finance staff, sourcing the right candidate is a continuous challenge. The company has historically used a paper and email-based process for managing applications. However, this was a time consuming and administration heavy method. In order to streamline the entire sourcing process, Boots decided to look at online recruitment and chose Jobpartners’ ActiveRecruiter solution, as it was very cost effective compared to other providers and provided powerful back office features.

Implementing the solution

In November 2004, Boots went live with its first recruitment campaign using ActiveRecruiter to source 1200 pharmacy students for placements in summer 2005.

“Throughout the implementation phase and on a continual basis, Jobpartners has been very responsive to our needs,” said Susie Maskell, Design Specialist, Human Resources at Boots. “The company has some very strong experience of working with large customers to improve their sourcing processes and has used this knowledge to help us fine tune recruitment at Boots.”

Using the Sourcing Request functionality, which ensures that candidates can only apply once but can highlight their preferences for three or more locations, Boots can easily and quickly respond to applicants and filter them into the correct region, area and store, aiming to accommodate first preferences.
Boots also uses ActiveRecruiter’s mass emailing functionality in order to communicate with students who have been offered a placement.
The reporting facilities of ActiveRecruiter help Boots to actively encourage applications from universities for pharmacy positions. The reports show how many people from each university have applied, enabling Boots to identify those, which produce a low number of applicants.

Speed, efficiency and better people relationship management

Recruitment is now consistent across the Boots stores and applying for a job is much easier, helping to enhance the employer brand. The Boots HR team has also been able to dramatically speed up its recruitment campaigns. For example, Boots completed its campaign to place pharmacy students for summer 2006 from start to finish three months earlier than usual.

“ActiveRecruiter has been instrumental in streamlining our recruitment process and providing speed and consistency. This has greatly helped to enhance our employer brand, and increase the attraction and retention of candidates,” commented Susie Maskell. “We can now quickly roll out large scale, efficient recruitment campaigns and we have a database of applications on file, which can be called upon for future skill requirements. We also have a much wider presence in the market and better visibility of recruitment right across the company, which has really improved our people relationship management.”

The future

Boots is currently looking at tracking the number of job applications it receives against the number of offers it makes. The company is also planning on investigating the impact of ActiveRecruiter on agency and advertising costs. Boots has already seen the use of agencies decrease in some areas such as Essex, which has helped to cut costs. Encouraging internal mobility is also on the agenda, which would be carried out via ActiveRecruiter.

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