Partner Spotlight: Atkins

Connectr have been working with Atkins, a design, engineering and project consultancy, for two years. This year, our aim is to reach, engage and support diverse talent to pursue a career with Atkins by joining one of their Early Career programmes, and to create a sense of belonging for new starters to reduce drop-outs.

Supporting candidates

We’ll be focusing on keeping candidates from each stream engaged during the hiring process to reduce reneges, and to ensure that they feel valued throughout the journey.

With their diversity and inclusion goals at the core of our activity, extra attention will be paid to ensure candidates from minority ethnic groups feel represented and included, and to maintain a gender balance.

As candidate experience is crucial, the internal resource will be supported by helping to manage the volume of candidate queries so that they are communicated with in a timely and efficient way.

Being agile

To sustain success, it’s key to be agile. With the pandemic causing Atkins to delay start dates, our support was extended to match this, and thus provide more module content and the additional functionality of Forums on Connectr 2.0.

Industry wide issues

In terms of diversity and inclusion, the sector sees 81% male employees. In our work with Atkins to date, we have been able to defy the industry wide issue with the Early Careers Connectr attracting 65% male and 35% female candidates.

Scaling up for Year Two

To meet our goals this year and build on our success, we will deliver:

• Connectr’s platform to support the attraction, pre-boarding and hiring of Atkins’ future talent
• Monthly employer partner dashboard reporting to support in development of attraction, engagement & retention strategies
• 40 digital mentors (split between the platforms)
• A new forums functionality, new tasks, & mentors for talent pooling from school engagement activities.

Benefits for target audience

The results will be that our audience will gain a deeper insight into the business and understand Atkins’ culture, their benefits and corporate responsibility. They will be supported in the hiring process from application through to day one, and can network with potential colleagues for digital mentoring support.

The pre-boarding content that they are provided with will therefore improve their ‘speed to value’ and confidence, making them valuable employees from the day they join.

Results so far…

The platform Connectr has established for Atkins has delivered:

• 1106 users
• Average 4.7 module ratings
• 40 mentors
• 1400 messages to mentors
• Greater diversity of hires
• Lower renege rate
• A way to ‘keep warm’ those candidates whose start dates were deferred
• 54% of platform users identify as being from a minority ethnic group

“I found the information very comprehensive and easy to understand, the user friendly structure made it quite compelling to join Atkins!”

Find out how Connectr can put the human back into your HR strategy.