Imperial College London: Developing a first-class recruitment solution

Imperial College London is credited as one of the world’s top ten higher education institutions, with a mission to benefit society through its excellence in science, engineering business and medicine. Part of achieving its mission, and retaining its high-profile status on the world stage, is hiring great people across all areas of the university, including catering, IT, communications, HR and academia.

Previously the recruitment team at Imperial would manually process applications, often causing issues, including duplications and inconsistencies, which led to to delays in the overall recruiting process. This prompted the team to search for a more self-sufficient, modern system to streamline the process and create efficiencies.

Imperial played an important role during the coronavirus pandemic, given its Department of Infectious Disease team’s involvement in the virus research and vaccine search. It was therefore vital to have a top-level recruitment function to support the university at this critical time.

Imperial College London underwent an HR transformation project to make all processes effective and efficient so that the team could better serve the university. Cornerstone’s Recruitment solution TalentLink had all the right functionalities and capabilities so needed to be fully embedded into the end-to-end process.

When it came to auditing and transforming the recruitment function, automation and digitalisation were the main priorities. The previous manual requisition process meant that the recruitment team spent a lot of their time on repetitive administrative activity, such as copying information from one form to another, so it was important to have a system that could streamline these processes whilst bringing wider benefits to the team.

Other solutions were considered for the challenge but the sophisticated capabilities and speed of implementation made TalentLink the top choice for Imperial. Following an internal focus group discussion, a new job requisition form and process was launched using TalentLink within three months.

Smoother end-to-end process. Three faculties and all support services divisions are currently using the new ‘request to recruit’ form, following the phased launch, and there has already been siginificant improvement to the process. Rather than each requsition being entered by hand, Imperial can now rely on the new online process via the TalentLink system to have all the information on new job requisitions entered and stored in one system, with managers able to make edits and approve where relevant. This means the recruitment function serves a better purpose for the team and for the university by providing a more efficient process.

Increased engagement among Hiring Managers. The team at Imperial were proud to see that managers have taken the new process fully onboard, using the new request to recruit form. Feedback from internal survey results shows extremely positive feedback from departments with urgent and regular recruiting needs, proving that the system is a huge success across the university.

Reduced burden on adminstrative tasks.

The new recruiting solution has put an end to the inefficient and time-consuming administrative tasks endured by the recruitment team and Hiring Managers. Now requisitions are processed and stored automatically meaning that the team can focus on value-added tasks that have a wider impact on the university.

Real-time visibility.

With a more efficient system in place for requisitions, Hiring Managers have better visibility on the overall process meaning requisitions can be processed quicker, thus filling vacancies quicker. As a result, Hiring Managers have become much more self-sufficient in their roles, proving their impact on the wider business