Surf's up at FatFace as e-recruitment saves 322,000 a year

Founded in 1988, and with over 148 stores across the UK, FatFace is the UK's leading active lifestyle brand. Forindividuals looking to embrace the 'life is out there' attitude and make the most of their career in retail, with an exciting, expanding global brand, FatFace offers the perfect opportunity to maximise their potential.

Maintaining the personal touch with candidates
As an employer, FatFace has strong brand awareness: the number of job applications it receives has tripled over the last two years alone. For the resourcing team this meant they had to find an effective way to manage the increase in volume whilst maintaining close connections with candidates. Fat Face also needed to address the amount of agency time that was used to drive candidate applications and job postings.

Aside from the administrative burden, the cost per hire for head office staff alone stood at over 3,000, Mark Powell, HR Director at FatFace, explains, At the time it was clear the delay in hiring staff was costing the company valuable time and money. Our routes to market seemed limited and costly, with a heavy reliance on recruitment agencies and paper based applications. Given our phenomenal growth over the last 12 months we felt the time had come to bring our recruitment process up-to-date.

The solution: riding the e-recruitment wave
With the number of retail and head office vacancies increasing by 45%, FatFace turned to StepStone's i-Grasp e-recruitment solution to computerise its recruitment processes and create a central online candidate database for the first time. The i-GRasp system integrated all elements of the recruitment process from job posting, through candidate application, selection, agency and job board management.

The company has also harnessed i-GRasp's event module to track interest and attendance at its annual open day for prospective employees. The system logs the details of candidates who registered interest in the event, enabling the company to send information to prospects ahead of the event, as well as keeping them posted regarding future job opportunities.

With a small internal resourcing team, the easy-to-use self-service features allowed managers to indicate their availability to attend interviews online and input feedback straight into the i-GRasp system. The system has also helped Fat Face establish its own jobs portal for the first time, helping it eliminate paper CVs almost completely as Powell explains: Before the switch to i-GRasp, we were keeping thousands of paper CVs in the office and managing these applications became a hugely labour intensive task. Using i-GRasp has helped us streamline the process and provides easy, direct access to a thorough CV database.

Hitting the highs of talent
i-GRasp has helped FatFace to reduce its recruitment spend at head office by two thirds. In turn, the company has also reduced the number of working days it takes to make a successful hire by four days for head-office positions, and a full working week for in-store staff. The changes in process and efficiencies that i-GRasp has helped unlock have led to annual cost savings of over 320,000 per year.

Aside from refining the interview process, FatFace also strived to enhance the candidate experience and perception of the brand. Mark Powell comments:

i-GRasp has helped us to replace admin intensive tasks with a more streamlined means of managing candidate applications. When moving the recruitment process online, it was important not to compromise personal contact with candidates. Using i-GRasp functionality like the online scheduling module, we can enhance candidate communication by making sure interview times are confirmed at the simple click of a button. As a result, we can stay close to our candidates and deliver a great brand experience.

Nine months after a successful implementation of i-GRasp, FatFace invited the StepStone Resourcing Excellence Services team into their head office to undertake an audit of their current recruitment practices. FatFace was keen to extend the efficiencies of its recruitment process and adoption of i-GRasp to build pools of future talent.

Having undertaken a thorough evaluation process, StepStone identified further cost and time savings through improvements to the relationships between the people, processes and technology within the company. Our relationship with StepStone has gone from strength to strength. We have now embarked on the first phase of a six month action plan designed specifically to achieve further administrative efficiencies, reducing time spent processing applications by 25%, comments Powell.

i-GRasp has proved hugely beneficial in enabling us to track talent more effectively and will continue to play a key role in our development of a truly proactive resourcing function.