Blue Zoo’s creative studio host a BAFTA-winning team creating projects that they can be
genuinely proud of, which is also true of their recruitment transformation project.
In its 21st year, Blue Zoo has grown to become one of the UK’s leading animation studios producing some of the most well loved kids’ shows on TV, award-winning commercials, and animated short films renowned for unique visual storytelling and innovation.
They do this by building a positive working environment, filled with talented, happy artists crafting fantastic content. Previously, Blue Zoo managed recruitment using manual processes and spreadsheets and with increasing demand for hiring new team members, they recognised the need for change.
Also, the Blue Zoo careers site was outdated and didn’t reflect the company and its growth. The studio’s level of interest and applications to job vacancies have been steadily increasing. They required a new recruitment platform with an integrated careers site to manage the candidate journey better and improve user experience.
Blue Zoo wanted candidates to be informed throughout every stage of the recruitment process and to showcase their employer brand. They also wanted to attract more talent using candidate-centric content that resonated with who they are as a studio, their company culture, and the employee experience.
Recruitment Challenges
After searching for the right recruitment platform for nearly a year, Blue Zoo almost gave up hope but found a solution with Eploy that would provide a way to manage the candidate experience in a fully flexible and customisable way. They also required an integrated careers site as a central hub for recruiting that would reflect their reputation for expertly crafting characterful content by their team of talent.
They wanted a recruitment platform that would work collaboratively across the recruitment team and with hiring managers to review and provide feedback to candidates and colleagues.
The brief was to deliver a great on-brand, online candidate experience aligned with their target
audience and roles. The careers site needed to show people at the initial stages of engagement what it is like to work at Blue Zoo, and help candidates understand their roles by using dynamic content.
The Implementation Approach
Traditionally, many ATS solutions delivered a poor experience when it comes to candidate journey. The “classic” ATS journey typically starts from a well-designed careers site that focuses on candidate experience and engagement and then clicking through to a job to apply. Often this meant the candidate landed on a poorly designed page running on the ATS providers domain name with no easy route back to content pages. Blue Zoo knew that the options with Eploy would give them a well-designed dedicated careers site, brand matched to their studio site.
The Eploy Implementation team seamlessly connected the studio site to a dedicated careers site designed fully ‘on-brand’ to ensure continuity – all integrated with the Eploy Recruitment platform.
With clear navigation, the careers site has visual appeal and intelligent search capability that
allows refinement of vacancy search by multiple options: keywords, the distance by postcode, specialism (Editorial, Lighting, Design, Vacancy Type, and so on).
When applying for a vacancy, the journey is designed for speed, allowing candidates to sign-in with their social media profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn.
The Eploy Implementation Team worked with Blue Zoo to develop a flexible recruitment process, using multiple workflows dependent on the role.
Results
Using Eploy’s Hiring Manager portal, hiring managers are now fully engaged. Shortlisting and interviews are managed consistently with a fully trackable workflow, and candidates receive regular communications about their application’s progress.
Eploy enables Blue Zoo to create and manage a hierarchy of desired skills by role through the core recruitment platform, then use it to match candidates to vacancies and internal hiring managers. The skills library within Eploy is instrumental as each job requires specific skill sets such as Lighting Artists or 3D Animators.
The careers site delivers a consistent brand experience, visually engaging with fresh and vibrant imagery.
The Eploy Candidate Portal gives candidates full control over their data consents and privacy preferences. It also provides an ‘intelligent job alerts’ feature – keeping candidates, freelancers and interims up to date with new opportunities.
Blue Zoo has also embraced online onboarding for new hires and successful candidates can view and sign their offer/contract and provide all of the information required before their start date.
Data and analytics overarch the entire solution. Using Eploy’s award-winning Dashboards
technology, Blue Zoo successfully measures and monitors all aspects of their recruitment process. One area of particular focus is Diversity and Inclusion. The team has set up dashboards to monitor D&I through the full hiring lifecycle, from candidate registration, applications, interviews all the way to new hires.
Commenting on the journey to recruit incredible talent, William Foulds, Talent Development Manager said “Eploy was the only solution that enabled us to manage the candidate experience in a fully flexible and customisable way. Our Hiring Managers can quickly review at each stage and provide feedback to candidates through Eploy’s Hiring Manager Portal and our careers site reflects our reputation for expertly crafting characterful content by our team of talent.
“We are attracting more international talent with our new careers site, and our hard-to-fill positions have seen an increase in applications of 60%. In our first few months, we had 1,658 people register on our careers site, which makes up 1,886 applications in total. The recruitment analytics delivered through Eploy’s customisable dragand-drop dashboards are invaluable and we are continually measuring and monitoring progress.”
Chris Bogh, Chief Technology Officer at Eploy commented “Blue Zoo understood the benefits of integrating their careers site with Eploy’s complete applicant tracking system and talent CRM. Our team use the latest responsive design techniques, combined with Blue Zoo brand to deliver the ultimate candidate experience”