Supporting Annual Graduate Recruitment for a Government Agency

Situation 

This UK government agency runs an annual graduate recruitment campaign to hire quality early careers talent across their policy advisor team. They turned to PeopleScout to ensure this process remained consistent, fair and unbiased.  

Solution 

The PeopleScout talent assessment team supports the agency’s graduate recruitment program each year, continuously improving campaigns year-on-year.  

Prior to the assessment center, PeopleScout organizes assessors to sift written exercises. Successful candidates then complete a bespoke Situational Judgement Test, which we designed specifically to assess how candidates would respond in true-to-life scenarios that employees will encounter in their roles at the agency. This sifts out approximately 30% of applicants who would be unlikely to succeed at the assessment center. 

Candidate then complete the assessment center, for which we provide assessors. The assessment includes a variety of exercises like role plays, interviews and structured policy conversations. These are freshly designed by the client each year, and PeopleScout supports by reviewing the materials for consistency and best practice.  

Our experienced assessment team provides an end-of-campaign analysis, adverse impact analysis and recommendations for continual improvement. For example, off the back of these recommendations, we worked collaboratively with our client to host the assessment centres through part of our Affinix technology suite to create a smoother candidate and assessor experience in their virtual assessment centers.  

Results 

For this annual graduate recruitment campaign, PeopleScout assessed 3,697 applications, with 140 people completing the assessment center over 4 weeks. Ultimately, 53 candidates went on to work for the agency.