About Kuehne + Nagel
Kuehne + Nagel is a global provider of supply chain solutions with operations in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific. They offer logistics solutions such as seafreight, airfreight, rail, road contract logistics and integrated logistics and serves a multitude of industries including aerospace, automotive, pharmaceutical and healthcare.
Cohesion have been providing a full end-to-end recruitment process solution to Kuehne + Nagel since 2014 and has continued to work in partnership to reach, engage and retain the best candidates to work across a variety of functions and departments within the Kuehne + Nagel business.
Background
Post Covid pandemic we can see that the 2022 graduate recruitment market has changed, and it is now very much a candidate lead market with increased competition for a reduced talent pool with employers seeing less applications and along with a decline in the quality of the applications they received.
We are also seeing a dip in candidate confidence, having not had the opportunity to undertake placements or part time work roles along with not having the access to the same level of university lead career guidance that they would have had being on campus. This has particularly impacted underrepresented groups as they have been most disadvantaged through the pandemic.
The Solution
Though Cohesion had historically delivered on successful campaigns with Kuehne and Nagel, it was recognised that we always need to be adaptable to what is happening in the market and that the candidate journey was more important than ever.
Firstly, having a dedicated phone line that candidates could call to discuss their application at any point meant the Early Talent recruitment team can be easily contacted by candidates, speaking a real person rather than a robot that was able to answer each individual query.
Offering candidate’s guidance at each stage, whether this be in written form as a ‘application form hints and tips’ which is easily accessible to all candidates on our website to sign posting candidates to practice video interviews before they sit their own.
Calling all of our candidates that have been selected to attend our assessment centre individually to give guidance on what to expect on the day as well as feedback on the assessments that they have already completed.
Knowing that candidates do not respond well to a lengthy process with various assessments which have not been proven to show what successful looks like in the organisation, verbal and numerical tests had previously been removed from the process, to enable to the candidates focus on the areas that relate directly to the behaviours that we look for. Also, the application form was intentionally kept short to encourage candidates to complete it, as we know video interviews are a better indicator the application form was used to capture contact information and one brief motivational question to highlight their interest in the company and role.
In order to support and develop all of our applicants despite their outcome within Kuehne and Nagel’s recruitment process we offer verbal feedback to all candidates, to enable them to improve.
At the same time its important that we receive feedback from our candidates in order learn and improve our processes, so a short survey is sent out to call candidates to complete, with their recommendations taken in onboard to provide a better candidate experience in future.
Results
We were able to fill all of Kuehne and Nagel’s recruitment requirements with high quality candidates. Unfortunately, the story didn’t end there…with so many roles available to candidates we did see a handful of candidates then go on to renege on their offers which meant when went back out for four
roles later in the recruitment season.
Again with the support structure in place we then able to back fill these roles and 20 Graduates started their Graduate Programme Induction in early September.
Feedback from candidates who went through the process was positive with one candidate stating that ‘I was impressed that I received personalised feedback from a real person by phone call’ and ‘I had a really positive experience. I was contacted several times throughout the process, both via email and telephone call.’
If you’d like to discuss how Cohesion can collaborate with you on a successful recruitment campaign, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Deborah Edmondson at debbie.edmondson@cohesionrecruitment.com or on 0121 716 3977
Ofwat – Graduate Campaign
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