Travis Perkins

Background

Recruiting energized candidates with core strengths is critical for bringing in individuals who will be both engaged and high performing. Travis Perkins plc, an FTSE 100 company and one of the UK’s leading companies in the builders’ merchants and home improvement market, partnered with Strengthscope to identify candidates with key strengths for a fast-track programme.

Travis Perkins understood the importance of balancing the candidate experience with having a robust process to assess for fit especially as the programme focuses on developing the recruited talent pool ready for a branch manager role following an immersive and intense 1-year programme.

Our solution

Building on Travis Perkins’ previous work and validation, we worked in partnership to codify the Travis Perkins ‘fit’ and build a ‘what great looks like’ profile to ascertain the key strengths and attributes of successful candidates. This profile then:

• Informed the design and training phase
• Allowed Travis Perkins to consider this insight beyond recruitment such as on-boarding, training and ongoing development.

Strengthscope co-designed and trained in telephone and face-to-face strengths-based interviews. These focused on getting to the heart of candidate’s passions and assessing them against core strengths from the role profile.

Our approach to strengths-based interviewing looks at both core strengths and the agility attribute through the design principles which measure:

• Outcomes that are critical for success in the role
• Productive strengths used by individuals to deliver these outcomes
• Agility in the use of strengths across different situations
• Learning and reducing performance risk – what has the candidate learned from key successes and mistakes?

Outcome

Feedback from interviewers has been very positive in terms of its simplicity and ease of use to quickly identify candidates with role-critical strengths.

There has been an increase in assessment centre to hire ratio with and an appetite to extend the strengths approach beyond recruitment.