Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (SWIP) is the sixth largest active investment manager in Europe, with £98.9 billion* of funds under management. They first approached Origin HR back in early 2006 to manage their fulltime graduate recruitment programme.
Origin HR was chosen because they offer the flexibility of a commoditised recruitment process, enabling us to use as little or as much of their service as we needed. From the beginning, they worked with our internal staff and external suppliers to design a seamless process management solution for our graduate intake.
Their re-design included the creation of a graduate web "portal" to allow us to accept online applications and process them more effectively. Even interview scheduling and rejections have been handled online, offering us immediate reporting potential and, more importantly, has led to significant time saving. Origin HR also helped re-write our graduate microsite, bringing it up to speed with the market and more attractive to today’s graduate.
A deadline of 29th October 2006 was given for SWIP’s graduate applications, generated from a targeted advertising campaign both internally within the Lloyds TSB group and through graduate websites and brochures.
Shortlisting of applications was complete by early November and those that were unsuccessful were notified automatically via the web portal. First round Interviews took place in Edinburgh and London shortly afterwards.
Unsuccessful candidates were then rejected, again via the graduate portal, and invites were sent to the successful candidates to attend an assessment centre in December. The business was kept up-to-date with progress and management information and competitive timing of each stage was maintained throughout the entire process.
At our two graduate assessment centres, facilitated by Origin HR, the graduates were put through their paces completing psychometric tests, structured interviews with the Fund Managers, group assignments, analysis exercises, and presentation exercises. Feedback was collated and given to candidates almost immediately resulting all vacancies having offers made.
From day one, the Origin HR team were focused on improving the management of our graduate process. We achieved our objectives in hiring excellent graduates, and Origin HR achieved this beyond our expectations.
Lynne Dalgarno
HR Director
*Source SWIP 30/09/06