Betting on talent at William Hill

Managers are saying it identifies better quality people and much more quickly. It is bringing us people who are much more interested, want to learn and want a job in the industry. The majority, rather than a minority previously, attend for interview and they perform better in the job. That is really positive. Nick Jolly, HR Projects Manager at bookmakers William Hill is talking about the company’s ATSI (Automated Telephone Screening Interview) system, which has halved the administration of filling 3,500 customer facing posts a year and raised the proportion of interviewees who are offered jobs from 15% to 40%.

Jolly says the system, devised with consultants Kenexa and rolled out across the company’s UK regional divisions since March 2003, replaces an unwieldy applications procedure that could mean the company missed the most talented candidates. We get around 40,000 applications a year, he explains.

Before, people would ring in and have their details taken. We would send them application packs, wait for the form to come back, then arrange an interview. The volume of applications meant it would take as long as a month. So the good people were likely to have got jobs by the time you had got round to seeing them.

By contrast, the ATSI invites applicants to carry out a short telephone interview which is analysed rapidly by Kenexa and the results fed back by the next day.

Someone could be doing the ATSI today and we’d be ringing them tomorrow morning and saying ’I have a slot this afternoon, would you like to come in’, says Jolly. It’s about accelerating talented people through the process, adds Kenexa Director Bill Tallon.

William Hill contracted Kenexa in August 2002 after a new business strategy prioritised differentiating the company’s offer from other bookmakers by creating welcoming environments and focusing on excellent customer service.

Jolly says he was impressed by conversations with the consultancy’s other clients such as B&Q and Nationwide who had successfully used its techniques for modelling the talents and personality traits of an organisation’s bet customer-facing employees, then using them to select new staff and to engage and motivate existing ones.

After interviewing William Hill’s highest performing customer service assistants, Deputy Managers and Managers Kenexa built a list of personality traits, such as taking pride in the job, needing a fast pace at work, empathy and ability to read customers’ moods, optimism and numerical astuteness. This profile of the model customer service assistant enabled Kenexa to draw up 150 targeted questions to identify people who met the requirements.

The questions were then trialled with the best customer service assistants and a control group with lower performance rankings and the 150 questions were eventually whittled down to 67. These formed the basis of the ATSI, piloted in William Hill’s Northern region from March 2003. The trial’s success led to a roll-out across the whole of the UK by January 2004.

Would-be applicants - usually prompted by poster ads in branch windows - now ring one of four small regional recruitment call centres and are screened for basic eligibility criteria such as age and work permits.

This is a highly automated process, but it’s important that when you apply to William Hill you talk to a human being first, says Tallon. Someone who can answer basic questions on pay and hours and other terms and conditions.

Callers are each given a personal identification number (PIN) and asked to call in the following 72 hours to go through the 12 minute ATSI, recording their responses to the 67 questions. Telephony hosting is provided by Kenexa’s partner Telecom One, which handles the phone voting for TV’s Pop Idol contest and has the capacity to cope with high call volumes.

The ATSI data from each interview is transferred to a graphical report which is accessible via the web within minutes to Kenexa in the United States for analysis and back to William Hill’s regional office. Based on their scores, candidates are divided into three categories:

Green - applicants who score high on the ATSI, showing all the successful traits.

Amber - individuals who display some of the necessary traits.

Red - people who do not match the required profile.

Applicants in the Green category are automatically invited for interview, while those with an Amber score will also be seen and could be taken on depending upon volume of vacancies at the time.

At the next (second) recruitment stage, a bespoke structured interview developed with Kenexa is used to pinpoint talent. It allows local managers to validate the individual’s ATSI results and assess their fit with the existing Licensed Betting Office team.

Though the ATSI screening is designed primarily to find the best customer service assistants, Kenexa have worked with Jolly and his team to adapt it to throw up candidates for hard-to-fill junior management posts.

The ATSI interview is seeded with a handful of questions designed to evaluate management potential. If an individual scores well on these questions they will be offered the choice of interviews for a customer service assistant or deputy branch manager post.

Jolly explains that with deregulation of the betting industry, the branches now open longer hours extended 363 days a year, which means good cover has been in short supply, particularly on the management side where staff must be highly trained and take responsibility for very large sums of money.

Historically in the London regions we couldn’t get the ratio of deputy managers to shops over 60% where we always wanted one to one, he says. Now we are approaching a full complement of deputy managers and that’s largely down to the ATSI.

The biggest overall measure of success of the ATSI is the fact that 40% of candidates who make it to interview stage are now offered jobs compared with 15% under the company’s old system. This means a huge time saving for the district managers tasked with interviewing applicants. The level of no-shows at interview stage has also dropped significantly, and the calibre of the recruits is high.

The feedback from shop managers is that these people are a definite improvement over previous hires, confirms Jolly. Another benefit he notes is that the company now has an objective approach to sifting applications country-wide where before decisions made by 130 local managers might have led to inconsistencies in applying company procedures.

We have all learnt useful lessons on the way, not least that we should always aim to recruit attitude and then train skills. RATS has a whole new meaning for us at William Hill.

It’s a huge success as far as we are concerned and it’s exceeded all our expectations, he says. But we are not satisfied with anything we do and we’ll keep on improving it.

One planned enhancement is making the ATSI available via the internet. We think that’s going to be a really powerful tool for the future, says Jolly.

We get a lot of students applying and they all have web access. He is also working with the company’s IT department to set up the recruitment call centres so they can instantly link callers’ postcodes to branches with vacancies.

Another priority is to give the district managers responsible for interviewing more training and support.

We have Roll Royce tools for sifting, now we need to have Rolls Royce mechanics at the interview stage, Jolly concludes.

Key Points

The main benefits of William Hill’s candidate screening process are:-

Improved odds in picking winning employees

Ease of use by both candidates and hiring managers

Fast results using proven technology; and

Objective talent selection with a human touch