StepStone engineers Total Talent Solution for Mouchel

Engineering success

Mouchel is a consulting and business services group that provides a wide range of design, managerial and engineering services to enhance public services and infrastructure development. With over 11,000 employees in the UK, the company is fast expanding and continues to establish partnerships between the public and private sectors.
The drive for innovative ways to deliver efficiency and profitability led Mouchel to completely redefine its use of technology to support its HR management strategy. In order to integrate an array of existing recruitment systems and deploy an effective, talent management solution worldwide, Mouchel turned to leading Total Talent management provider, StepStone. With growing competition for highly qualified graduates across the industry, the company was keen to enhance its approach to attracting and retaining graduates and develop a recruitment excellence programme.

Making total talent a reality

Ruth Mundy, HR Director of Mouchel, explains, We have nearly trebled in size over the last three years and needed to ensure we delivered a competitive candidate recruitment service to support our expanding workforce. By replacing our existing labour intensive, paper-based recruitment process with an integrated, global solution, we could not only enhance our internal management capabilities but also gain a clear picture of talent across the organisation. The fact we had already successfully implemented StepStone's e-Recruitment solution meant our choice of provider for the next stage of our Total Talent programme was easy.

Traditionally, the company had managed staff salary data on a large number of excel spreadsheets and relied upon a number of different HR systems. Mouchel's existing relationship with StepStone proved hugely beneficial when extending the technology to improve compensation planning for its workforce of over 11,000 employees. StepStone developed and customised the salary and compensation planning module, which completely transformed Mouchel's salary review process in less than four months - both on time and within budget. As all information can be presented in a unified format and stored centrally this enabled line managers to plan and make recommendations more quickly. With StepStone's Total Talent solution in place, Mouchel was able to accurately identify its recruitment and talent management needs and customise the solution to suit them.

Overcoming initial challenges

At the start of the implementation process, Mouchel underestimated the initial reluctance from line managers to move recruitment, talent and compensation management online. However, with the help of StepStone, Mouchel successfully introduced a number of measures to facilitate a smooth integration process and to ensure any initial set backs were addressed:

Engaged champions in the business to promote the benefits throughout the company

Shared the cost saving data to demonstrate the time and cost savings to the line managers

Offered additional training to engage line managers - training 1000 line managers in competency based interviewing skills

Embedded a network of e-Recruitment administrators in the process

Slashing hiring costs and labour time

The Total Talent platform followed the successful implementation of StepStone's e-Recruitment solution. Receiving 600 CVs and recruiting 150 new employees a month, Mouchel was finding its existing processes to be increasingly inefficient as the company expanded. In response to this high demand, Mouchel implemented StepStone's e-Recruitment solution during the early stages of its recruitment drive to improve the process and support its rapid business growth.

This first stage of the Total Talent programme enabled the company to achieve significant time and cost savings when recruiting and managing existing personnel. These benefits included:

Reduced cost per hire by over 50% (to 1,500 per candidate from an original cost of 3,000 - 4,000)

Reduced time to hire by over 65% (from 10 weeks to 3.5 weeks per successful candidate)

Increased graduate recruitment activity and developed Graduate Recruitment Programme

Achieved a better monitoring of candidate diversity

Reduced agency use from 60% to 40%

Developed a fully branded careers website and introduced an automated response system to help engage candidates

Developed capability to track other jobs candidates have applied for

Reduced ratio of CVs per hire

Mouchel Graduate Academy Programme

Another core element of the total talent programme was Mouchel's Graduate Academy Programme for Graduates and Masters Graduates throughout the UK. With over 250 graduates invited to join the eighteen-month programme each year, the Academy provides successful candidates with the opportunity to experience different fields within the business with the potential to work overseas on specific projects. In addition, all employees within the company are encouraged to work towards a professional qualification.

Mouchel accepts Graduate applications all year round and required support from StepStone's team based in Scotland during their busiest period for applications (February - April). Almost 500 new applications were received within this three month period, adding to the 100 applications already outstanding in the e-Recruitment system.

StepStone provided support at various stages of the graduate recruitment process including screening new applications in accordance with the provided criteria, emailing the successful candidates' details to line managers, booking candidates into assessment centres for face-to face interviews, whilst actively contacting potential candidates who had not submitted their application form but were still interested in a role at Mouchel. Discussing the importance of driving graduate hires, Ruth Mundy, HR Director of Mouchel, comments, As a company, we've always been focussed on getting highly talented graduates on board and building pools of talent for the future. By automating the management of applications, we were able to clear the backlog of administration and ensure every new application was screened within 24 hours of being received. This quick response rate meant that over a quarter of the candidates assigned to a specific job role progressed to interview stage, which in turn, helped to deliver a positive experience of the Mouchel brand to potential graduate hires.

Looking to the future

Following the success of the solution, Mouchel plans to extend its Total Talent programme further by rolling out a performance management module. This addition will help Mouchel to better track employees' performance across the organisation and analyse their personal skills and training requirements. It will also encourage more consistency when setting employee objectives with increased visibility of talent across the organisation.

Mouchel also intends to integrate succession planning, which will reduce the ratio of external to internal hires, whilst better matching internal skills and capabilities to internal positions. In addition, the StepStone Total Talent solution will allow exit interviews and surveys to be incorporated into the recruitment process to increase efficiency and support the organisations future growth. Finally, the company is looking to mirror the processes and success it's had in the UK, in the Middle East, where it has 600 employees.