Video interviews cut time to hire

AJ Mohammed | 24.05.2018

ClientGlobal Online Travel Company

ChallengeTight deadlines

ResultAverage time to hire: 14 days

What was the impact?

90 candidates sourced in 4 weeks

1/3 sourced candidates hired within first 4 weeks

Candidate satisfaction: 100%

Contractors payrolled and housed in M3S office

Time saving and inovative video recruitment solution

Online travel search sites have become a highly competitive business. One way of differentiating the offer and raising brand awareness is to provide interesting and informative content. But what sort of content? How effective is it? You will never really know until you try. For this reason, this Global Online Travel Company had a short-term requirement for editorial skills to run a feasibility study. The company turned to M3S for the solution.

The client

This leading travel search site connects people directly to everything the travel industry has to offer. Its highly rated free mobile apps have been downloaded more than 40 million times. Their products are available in more than 30 languages and 70 currencies. The company was founded in 2003 and currently employs more than 770 staff.

The challenge

In order to drive up their brand awareness through blogging and targeted social media activities, the company decided to recruit 25 content writers and three editors for a three-month test project at its office. The objective was to establish whether high-quality written content (including travel blogs, editorials and market insights) would have a positive impact on revenues and raise their profile in the region. Their aim was to have all the contractors on-boarded within just four weeks. After an initial conversation, M3S drafted a proposal demonstrating an innovative approach to identifying and hiring content professionals who would meet expectations.

The solution

The project gave M3S the opportunity to leverage a newly designed recruitment portal called The List, designed to offer clients a way of viewing candidates’ profiles, and short videos where they describe their abilities and suitability to specific roles. It proved to be an ideal way to source candidates with the right profile: primarily talented and creative university graduates looking for temporary work. The approach saved time because it meant there was no need to conduct first round interviews with candidates face to face.

M3S was able to source candidates very quickly thanks to its expertise spanning marketing communications and content creation, knowledge of the travel and hospitality sector, experience in managing freelance contract hires, and great contacts in the graduate market.

The benefits

M3S sourced more than 90 highly motivated and well-qualified candidates from some of the leading universities and multi-national companies in a 4-week window. At the time, our client was expanding rapidly and had limited office space, so M3S’ ability to payroll and house these freelance contractors in its own offices was a further added value of the service. M3S could monitor the productivity of the writing teams and provide a clear communication channel between the candidates and the client. 90% of the candidates identified by M3S were called to interview and of these, a third were recruited. Average time to hire was a mere 14 days.

The M3S Programme Manager commented, “By housing all the contractors in our office we could manage each of them properly, ensuring that they worked the scheduled hours they were being paid for. They did have the option of working at home, but it was more effective to bring them into our offices on a daily basis.
“The speed of delivery and the efficient administration behind the recruitment activity was a huge relief for the client given the time constraints.”

The combination of this insight and experience with the deployment of an innovative approach enabled us to meet the demanding client brief on schedule.