By law, financial services organisations have a lengthy recruitment cycle. In fact, it can take more than three months for all the necessary checks of potential new team members to be carried out.

But it’s a situation that led to Standard Life not always being able to recruit the quality of candidates it wished to… and in them having a high turnover of team members in their first year at work. Quite simply, great candidates were finding alternative jobs in the long wait to start work – and the people who were left once all the checks had gone through weren’t always necessarily the best fit.

To turn this situation around, we mapped out the journeys of people considering, interviewing and coming to work at the pensions and long-term savings company.

It became apparent that:

• People were being left for too long without any information or updates
• The tone of the communications that were happening was legalistic and not as welcoming as it might have been

We used the maps to identify key points along the journey where job applicants and candidates should get clear information that conveyed the organisation’s forward-looking, friendly personality. Then we created collateral – including new job ads, new job ad guidelines, packs, emails, letters and forms – as well as creating new processes to start the new system.

The results? More candidates remained engaged throughout the recruitment journey – and retention beyond year one improved significantly.