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2018 Finalists - Will Spensley Memorial Award for Innovation - PRIVATE SECTOR

PwC

In partnership with Entegy

PwC's Canvas Career Jam: Reimagining assessment centres through technology

Each campus recruitment season PwC welcomes thousands of students and graduates into our offices nationally to take part in ‘PwC’s Canvas Career Jam’. Once known as an ‘assessment centre’, we’ve reimagined this process to create a digitally-led experience that truly reflects PwC’s innovative and collaborative culture. Pushing beyond the boundaries of traditional assessment centre frameworks, we harnessed technology and digitized our process to make it more efficient and personalised than ever before for both candidates and PwC staff.  

 

To achieve this, we designed a smartphone app to digitally guide candidates and assessors through the experience. The app provided a space for students to connect with each other prior to the day, provided them with bespoke information on each office location and content on how to best prepare, offered the opportunity for us to share content via the feed, and replaced the need for physical assessment guides. Most significantly, it fostered a more effective recruitment process as the app aggregated assessor feedback in real-time and ensured data integrity in the process. This meant our recruitment team were able to run multiple events with over 100 candidates each, and most notably were equipped to turn around nearly 1000 job offers in just five working days following the events.

 

How did we go?

·        99% of students rated the experience as positive

·        100% of students would recommend PwC as a place to work after attending the event

·        83% favourable score from the students on using the app

·        88% favourable score from PwC assessors

 

By implementing an app-driven process we were able to create a digitally immersive candidate experience that helped students to unleash their potential and have fun in the process.

QBE Australia

In partnership with Fusion Graduate Consultancy

Reimagining QBE’s graduate onboarding experience

In recent years, QBE’s renege rates for graduates post offer have exceeded 25%.

This figure was unsustainable, so this year QBE reimagined its graduate onboarding experience.

Past graduates told us that we didn’t engage with them post offer and failed to properly engage them through induction and their development. 

 

QBE’s vision is ‘to be the insurer that builds the strongest partnerships with customers’. Forging these partnerships starts from within, so we got to work on creating an enhanced graduate experience, driving increased interaction with our graduates.

From offer to induction and beyond, we used technology to connect our graduates with QBE and each other nationally: 

 

  • Launched a custom-designed online graduate portal to:

    • Share key information including our latest QBE Strategy Podcasts

    • Host discussion forums that encouraged two-way communication

  • Connected graduates through video introductions

  • Development webinars post induction created opportunities for our graduates to reconnect throughout their journey

 

QBE personalised the onboarding experience:

  • Connecting graduates with buddies to support their transition

  • Sending ‘Welcome Packs’ to interstate graduates to make their trip to Sydney for induction seamless

 

Cultivating connections with The QBE Foundation early was key. Many of our 2018 graduates reported their favourite part of the onboarding experience was the induction team challenge, where they partnered with The Kids Cancer Project, to write and illustrate their own books which they will present to children in hospital.

 

Through delivering innovative communication solutions and personalising the onboarding experience, we increased retention of graduates following our offer. 

 

Only 5% of candidates reneged their offer for our 2018 graduate program. 

Our 2018 graduates said: 

“It has been phenomenal.” 

 “It’s definitely not the insurance experience I was expecting.”

REA Group

A chatbot for graduates before they start at REA Group

We were looking at ways to better engage grads in the crucial time period between acceptance letter and their start date. So, when the idea of creating a chatbot surfaced, we jumped straight on it, because we know digital solution ideas can come from all corners of our workplace and life – not just the ‘tech folk’. 

 

 

This bot we now call ‘Gradbot’ will answer the burning questions grads have about their program and will share information about upcoming meetups and hackdays. It reflects our determination to keep things real and take risks, and mirrors the great experience already delivered in our REA Group grad end-to-end recruitment process. Gradbot has REA’s authentic communication style, which is what candidates tell us they find so refreshing about interacting with us.   

 

 

So far, Gradbot has answered the number one question our new grads ask: “What should I be reading and what tech should I be familiar with before my start date?”. It also delivers key company content around our grad program details, helping them achieve a smoother transition into the business. 

 

 

Gradbot prompts for feedback after periods of inactivity so we’ll be able to serve more relevant content for future releases. So far our new grads have offered feedback that Gradbot is ‘fully sick’, ‘rad’ and ‘awesome to see REA Group walk the talk in regards to having fun while learning’. Gradbot helps them feel even more prepped, supported and ready to hit the ground running, while giving the business really useful insight into our graduate needs prior to them starting. 

Saab Australia

Saab Graduate School

Saab Australia has developed an innovative program titled Saab Graduate School which forms a part of the two year Graduate Program.

 

Saab Graduate School involves graduates participating in a four hour session, held fortnightly, over the first 12 months of the program. Graduates come together in a classroom environment to undertake a mixture of self -study, collaborative teaching and learning, curriculum teaching and hands on practicals to help the graduates absorb and practice new skills.

 

The School provides learning and development in a number of competency areas which has been categorised into three learning groups, Knowing my Business, Knowing my Skills and Knowing Myself (see diagram attached).

 

There are a number of outcomes from Saab Graduate School that Saab Australia hopes to achieve, however, the main desired outcome for each cohort is to teach them the required habits and instil a culture that inspires them to be intrinsically motivated to continually learn and improve throughout their careers.  

 

The innovation comes from creating a generation of graduates that will become the seed to inspire others to seek to continually learn and improve in order to meet the challenges of both today and tomorrow. 

 

 “The Saab Graduate program exposes graduates to a variety of domains such as Maritime, Civil Security and Mixed Reality through graduate (school), affording them a unique and rewarding holistic business perspective while also helping shape where they would best fit within Saab.”– Daniel Stone, 2nd Year Graduate Software Engineer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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