Atlas Hotels: Upgrading recruitment to provide a premium candidate experience

Atlas Hotels is a hotel management company with 50 Holiday Inn Express and Hampton by Hilton hotels across the UK, all focused on delivering fantastic experiences for guests. Atlas Hotels wanted to ensure this same great experience for employees and potential candidates to help create a rewarding place to work.

Previously, there was no recruitment strategy or processes, and it was highly time-consuming manually sifting through hundreds of CVs for each job posting – and often great talent was missed. Employee retention was also a challenge and Atlas Hotels wished to combat turnover rates. Having just refined the company’s values, finding talent that shared those values was even more important.

A steady foundation for recruitment was needed to provide both consistency and convenience to make the recruitment process easier, more efficient and to ensure Atlas Hotels hired candidates that were a good fit for the business and its vision.

Why Cornerstone?

Atlas Hotels needed a good quality applicant tracking service system to act as a recruitment hub. TalentLink, Cornerstone’s Recruiting solution, was able to bring more structure to Atlas Hotels’ recruitment process and offered greater ability to sort through candidates and identify suitable talent. It also offered the flexibility needed and could be configured to exactly what Atlas Hotels required.

Having the ability to use integrations, such as DocuSign and interview scheduling tools, enabled Atlas Hotels to have all recruitment processes and tools in one convenient place, making TalentLink the one-stop-shop for everything recruitment.

Atlas Hotels also needed automation in place so that every single candidate heard back about their application to help build a pleasant, simple and frictionless candidate experience, regardless of whether they were offered the job or not. TalentLink, provided the additional functionality and configuration to automate this experience to make it more personalised, without needing a huge amount of continuous manual input.

The Results

Better candidate experience: The application process has been drastically simplified, asking for minimal details and putting ease-of-use front and centre. With TalentLink, Atlas Hotels now has pre-written and pre-uploaded customised and branded templates for responses to candidates. All applicants are contacted about their application progress and receive responses tailored to them.

Reduced time to hire: Atlas Hotels set a target of 25 days time to hire. Before implementation, the time to hire was 36 days, reducing to 24.4 days in just one month following the first stage of implementation and dropping to 16.3 after the second, resulting in more than a 50% reduction within the first year. Early feedback from managers shows candidates seem more engaged and fit with values more.

Simplified structures and saved time: Managers no longer have to manually sift through CVs as the top ten candidates are automatically selected and sent to hiring managers for review. Applicants can also organise their own interviews with e-book system integrations, meaning managers are spending less time on admin and can focus on value-adding tasks.

Increased manager autonomy: The benefits of TalentLink were seen first-hand by managers before even starting to use the system. Not only was there keen buy-in but managers have easily got to grips with the simple-to use system and they now have more autonomy as they are less reliant on support from the recruitment team.

Driven diversity: Through automating the recruitment process there is less room for subjectivity and unconscious bias. Candidates are shortlisted by their fit with the company’s values and often CVs are not required for roles, granting a level playing field for every candidate regardless of past experience. Consequently, Atlas Hotels is now hiring a higher percentage of people from outside the industry, enabling Atlas Hotels to benefit from a more diverse workforce.