Superdrug’s graduate programme aims to onboard the hottest new talent in pharmaceuticals. With such a great reputation, however, the High Street chemist’s HR department found that it was receiving over 500 applications each year for only 16 placements, making the recruiting process difficult and time-consuming.
Not only did Superdrug’s recruiters want to guarantee that they were finding the most qualified candidates for each position, but they also needed to make sure that the general calibre of the applicant pool was higher than ever before.
Superdrug was finding that the majority of applicants all had similar work experience and graduate degrees, so the key differentiator between candidates had to be personality, which was difficult to get a sense of through just a phone interview. Additionally, the applicant phone interviews each took an average of 15 minutes, and with recruiters spending a total of 125 hours on the phone for each recruitment round, it was becoming far too mammoth a task for the company’s HR department.
LaunchPad Recruits was brought onboard to help Superdrug’s HR department select candidates to invite to a face-to-face interview, replacing the relatively unhelpful and time-intensive phone interviews.
All 500 applicants to the grad programme were invited to complete a video interview on LaunchPad’s platform. The interview itself consisted of three interview questions, each with a time limit of one minute to answer — a move which cut the total interview time from a whopping 15 minutes down to just three.
The questions were focused on identifying the individual skills required for a pharmacist as well as a candidate’s personality traits, a combination that helped interviewers accurately determine whether or not they were the right fit for the job.
Out of the 500 people invited to interview, 94% of candidates completed the video interviewing process. After the recruitment team narrowed the pool down to the shortlist, the remaining applicants were invited to participate in a face-to-face interview. Once this stage was completed, the company made 16 new hires.
Superdrug found the process to offer such an improvement over its previous phone interview procedure that it’s now decided to use LaunchPad to fill all of its positions, including retail assistants, marketing executives, assistant store managers, and store managers.
The flexibility of LaunchPad’s video interviewing platform will give Superdrug the tools it needs to select successful applicants based on the skills specifically required for each of these positions, allowing them to implement a seamless and efficient hiring process.
