How Royal Mail Created an Exciting and Inclusive Online Onboarding Experience for their Christmas Seasonal Workers

The Challenge:

Create an outstanding candidate experience whereby candidates received the information they needed in a timely manner, while reducing the people- hours required to answer their enquiries. Increase engagement and reduce renege and attrition rates. Hire a workforce who were invested in ‘delivering Christmas’ using a 100% digital process.

The Solution:

Three chatbots, to help match candidates to positions, and answer questions at all hours. A Timeline for Onboarding that provided a social media style platform taking candidates from offer to their first week.

The Results:

87,000 chatbot conversations, reducing email enquiries by 69%, and answering 80% of candidate questions. 94% of candidates registered for Timeline, with 83% feeling more prepared for day one. Attrition down 50%.

Royal Mail had always held large-scale, face-to-face recruitment events for their Christmas Flexible Worker roles, but in 2020 they moved to an entirely digital recruitment process. This meant that candidates were being asked to do everything online – from applying and having their documents verified to accessing support and completing their induction process.

Whilst the process in 2020 had been a success in terms of attracting, processing, and hiring the numbers needed, the pandemic and uncertainty around jobs and furlough had undoubtedly helped Royal Mail meet their quotes: a situation that was unlikely to be repeated the following year.

A knock-on effect of going completely digital was also the sheer volume of enquiries candidates had during the different stages of the journey, resulting in the Advice & Support team being overwhelmed by incoming emails, hitting 1,000 per day at its peak. This meant delays in getting back to candidates to resolve their queries, which in turn led to a poor candidate experience and a longer time to hire.

Attrition was also proving a concern. Coupled with the increase in consumer online spending and subsequent competition for temporary Christmas workers across the logistics and retail sectors, ensuring candidates were kept warm and engaged once they’d accepted an offer was going to be key. In 2020, a ‘Countdown to Christmas’ email campaign had been implemented, but it required the team to manually input candidate details, something that was hugely labour intensive for an already over-stretched team.

Going into the 2021 Christmas season, the key areas of focus were to:

• Reduce email enquiries to the Advice & Support team
• Provide 24/7 access to FAQs
• Reduce the people-hours required to input candidate details into current Countdown to Christmas keep warm initiative
• Reduce renege/no show rates from point of offer to day one
• Reduce attrition in first few weeks from day one
• Provide a better candidate experience throughout the process

Working with the Royal Mail Group’s Christmas Project Team, Meet & Engage looked at how we could implement our chatbot and onboarding technology to meet these objectives, focusing on each stage of the process to ensure maximum impact for both Royal Mail Group and the candidate.

Breaking the project down, we looked at each stage of the recruitment journey separately. How could we create a positive candidate experience and at the same time reduce the burden on the Royal Mail Group team?

It was agreed that we would introduce the use of chatbots at each stage of the process and introduce an onboarding platform to replace the Countdown to Christmas keep-warm initiative.

Meet and Engage worked with Royal Mail to create:

Holly, the match-me chatbot shared key aspects of the role including a ‘day in the life’ video at the pre- apply stage served up via a plugin on the Royal Mail Careers website’s Christmas recruitment pages

Robin, the in-process FAQ chatbot: For anyone at the in-process stage of the recruitment journey served up as a full-page plugin via a link within ATS email comms

Nick, the Onboarding FAQ chatbot:  For anyone at the post-offer stage of the recruitment journey served up within the Timeline platform as well as a full-page plugin

Timeline for Onboarding: Onboarding platform for all those from point of offer accept candidates were invited to register via link within ATS email comms

Holly was designed to explain the role of a Christmas Flexible Worker. Robin and Nick were designed to help answer frequently asked questions. Robin and Nick both handed over to an email if the user couldn’t find the answer to their question through the chatbot.

Timeline had two distinct flows of content. The ‘Pre-start’ flow shared content aimed at supporting the candidate through the induction stage of the recruitment journey – sharing links to the Induction Hub, reminding them to watch the videos and complete the survey. The ‘Post-start’ flow had more general content aimed at informing and engaging users once they’d joined Royal Mail.

• 87,000 chatbot conversations
• 42% of chatbot queries were answered out of hours
• 79% positive smiley face feedback
• 69% reduction in email traffic
• 80% of candidate questions answered by Robin and Nick
• 83% felt more prepared for day one
• 94% registration uptake
• 50% reduction in attrition
• 90% enjoyed their welcome portal content
• x7 average number of visits

The essence of a great candidate experience is about being responsive, informative and communicative to support a candidate throughout their recruitment journey. It’s about educating on the realities of the role, providing answers to questions when they’re needed, and sharing relevant, helpful and fun content to help them feel engaged and connected. It’s about making them feel part of the team before they’ve joined and making them feel they’re valued from the start.

For us, this campaign has been a real joy to be part of. It was a true collaboration between a client and supplier, working together to achieve results that at the outset we could only have dreamt of. This culminated recently in an award for “Best Recruitment Technology Strategy”.