Virgin Media: A Virtual Approach to Call Center Recruiting

Situation

As the UK entered lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, enquiries to Virgin Media contact centers—including customer video calls—increased by up to 95% during daytime hours. To maintain excellent service and keep customers connected during this critical time, Virgin Media created more than 500 new contact center jobs in the UK based in Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester and Teesside.

All 500 new hires needed to start in just two months, with the added complication of taking into account social distancing measures. Due to lockdown, candidates could not attend assessment centers or interviews onsite.

Plus, contact center managers did not have capacity to interview so many candidates while maintaining stringent service levels, and right-to-work onboarding checks could not go ahead as normal with an in-person visual review of original documentation.

Additionally, Virgin Media introduced a number of measures to ensure its people remained as safe as possible while continuing to help answer customer queries. This included providing remote working capabilities, where possible, and flexible working patterns.

All of this experience needed to be brought-to-life for candidates at the outset of their application to ensure swift hiring of the right caliber people. Virgin Media engaged PeopleScout for recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) and tech-charge talent assessment solution.

Solution

With a tight turnaround in play, we formed an agile working group which met twice daily to track project implementation and delivery progress. This rigorous schedule resulted in the deisgn and implementation of a new virtual hiring process in less than two weeks. This new fast-tracked application and assessment process used video interviews, dramatically reducing the processing time and allowing new staff to be selected within days and start within weeks.

To generate applications, we built a new page on the Virgin Media careers site and created an enhanced attraction plan to drive applicants there. We diverted existing candidates (whose roles had been cancelled) into the new process. To improve quality of applications and speed-up hiring, The microsite was built with two areas: a hints and tips page and a page illustrating the overall application process.

Recruiting capacity was scaled up, utilizing our global delivery centers to score over 5,000 application and nearly 2,000 video interviews and to support onboarding of successful candidates without delay.

Results

Within two weeks of launch, PeopleScout’s RPO team had:

• Designed a virtual interview process from scratch
• Delivered 5,500 new applications
• Conducted over 1,800 online video interviews
• Instigated 400 final stage qualification calls
• Made nearly 300 offers within 4 weeks of kickoff
• 95% of qualified candidates approved for hire during the Hiring Manager audit step