Do resumes truly reflect the essential characteristics of candidate? Are they useful in predicting whether someone will perform well in a role? After you’ve reviewed a few hundred, or even just a few dozen, they all start to look alike.
That’s exceptionally true when it comes to evaluating students, who really don’t have much experience to present.
One recruiting agency based in London — Brightsparks — specializes in campus recruiting, placing students into temporary roles to meet catering, hospitality, and other similar needs.
A case study we recently published explains how Brightsparks has gone beyond the resume. Learn how this agency uses advanced evaluation technology, including scorecards and assessments, to make data-driven hiring decisions that deliver far more consistency and quality to clients than relying on resumes alone.
Brightsparks has placed more than 14,000 candidates since 2003 and has used SmartRecruiters since 2016.
As Jake Wibberly, Senior Talent Manager at Brightsparks explains, “it’s hard to differentiate younger candidates on a CV” and that using SmartRecruiters helps recruiters more easily assess skills and values to match students to the best roles. He says that Brightsparks clients “really appreciate the quality of talent we present – candidates they may otherwise overlook.”
Assessing and managing 22,000 candidates
The Brightsparks recruiting team now has a database that includes 22,000 candidates. That’s a valuable resource, but requires creating standardized processes for assessing skills and values, managing data and analytics, and maintaining ongoing communications. Fortunately, that’s all easily accomplished through SmartRecruiters.
Given that resumes from student candidates cannot provide a complete view of skills and values, Brightsparks uses SmartRecruiters on regular “Assessment Days” it hosts for groups of students. Standardized scorecard evaluations help recruiters be far more consistent and accurate with less bias — leading to more informed data-driven decisions on which candidates to present to clients.
A “balancing point” for consistency: Demonstrating the agency “gets it”
Jake explains that SmartRecruiters gives the Brightsparks team a “balancing point so that we can be sure our processes are consistent,” noting that customizable scorecards with pre-saved questions allows high consistency even with multiple interviewers.
And as specialists in campus recruiting, Brightsparks must attract Generation Z talent, candidates who are far more engaged in job posts that mirror social media interaction. That’s one reason why the agency chose SmartRecruiters. Jobs that Brightsparks posts appear similar to what candidates already see on sites such as Facebook, and can be posted on multiple sites in just a few minutes.
Jake says that using SmartRecruiters demonstrates to students that the company “gets it.”
As he points out, “by impressing candidates with an engaging and transparent experience, we show them that we understand their needs and can answer all their questions. Even better — our clients get the best talent, so they’re delighted, too.”
Making clients look good
In addition to presenting an excellent candidate experience and evaluating students through more effective assessment tools, Brightsparks is also keenly concerned about its own performance — using SmartRecruiters analytics to evaluate its ROI and metrics on which sourcing pipelines deliver the best results.
“Not only do we have a wealth of data to make these decisions,” Jake says, “it’s easy to distill information into infographic form that makes it abundantly clear how we’re performing against key metrics.”
“At the end of the day we’re making our clients look good, which grows our business thanks in large part to SmartRecruiters,” he adds.
Read more in our case study to discover how going beyond the resume helps Brightsparks make more informed decisions thanks in large part to SmartRecruiters.
