

At a glance
William Hill is a successful British gaming company that operates around 1,300 shops across the UK. Every year they received over 30,000 applications for retail roles which were manually screened. Read on to see how the William Hill and AMS Assessment Advisory teams successfully reduced time-to-hire, while ensuring candidate quality and at the same time greatly improved the process for both the candidate and hiring manager.
The partnership was powered by HireVue, a video interviewing technology platform that lets recruiters and hiring managers screen candidates and conduct live interviews.
Key outcomes included:
- 15 minutes to complete candidate assessment
- Time from application to scheduled interview reduced by 88% on average
- 9.3 out of 10 in candidate satisfaction scores
"The implementation of HireVue has supported the speed of getting candidates into our c.1300 shops, which has been fantastic in filling gaps left by the somewhat transient nature of our workforce. The improved time to interview has played a pivotal role in this, and feedback from managers has been great with the speed of hire lessening burdens placed on them. Moreover, the interactive and seamless nature of the HireVue assessment has resulted in strong candidate feedback scores, which set a great first impression with our candidates before they join William Hill as employees."
– People Partner for evoke
The challenge
It could take over 2 weeks to progress preferred applicants to interview, resulting in a slow candidate experience, and often by this time preferred candidates had already received offers from elsewhere. Together, our teams set out to resolve the following challenges:
• Reduce the time it took to screen candidates
• Ensure candidate quality
• Reduce time-to-offer
• Improve candidate experience
• Improve hiring manager experience
Solution and impact
Throughout the entire process, the William Hill team were able to offer first hand insights and valuable knowledge to the AMS Assessment Advisory team. This joint collaboration provided outcomes which were able to capture and define “what a great candidate looks like” for both Customer Service and Team Leader roles. On the back of this, we were able to create a tech enabled games-based assessment tool to screen for these hand-picked high performing characteristics which allowed William Hill to automate the initial screening stage. If candidates demonstrated the right aptitudes, they were pre-qualified and booked for interview within 24 hours.
The Assessment only took candidates 15 minutes to complete and received candidate satisfaction scores of 9.3 out of 10 on average, as well as improved candidate diversity as it allowed us to screen candidates solely against the skills required for the role, rather than using arbitrary criteria such as previous customer service experience.
The impact
- Candidate quality was regarded favourably by hiring managers at William Hill. The application – interview – offer ratio averaged c. 12: 4: 1, with slightly higher interview numbers completed as hiring managers typically wished to meet all shortlisted candidates
- Time from application to scheduled interview reduced from an average of 15 days, to an average of just 1.8 days on average
- Candidate experience feedback has been outstanding, with AMS Candidate Satisfaction ratings of 9.5 out of 10 on average between Feb 2023 and Feb 2024
- HireVue’s candidate satisfaction feedback also captured a 92% satisfaction rating. Written feedback provided included comments such as: “I felt at ease, as a person with ADHD and dyslexia I felt it accommodated my way of thinking.”
- Hiring manager satisfaction ratings were also outstanding, averaging 8.8 out of 10. With Hiring Managers appreciating the increased speed of this new process allows them to backfill vacancies much more quickly than before.
- Working in Partnership. Every 6 months, the William Hill and AMS stakeholders have a regular review of the continued performance of this solution, collaborating to review the agreed success metrics plus candidate and hiring manager feedback every 6 months. This ensures continued performance / corrective measures can be taken if required – and having continued governance and longitudinal review of project success metrics is something that is now embedded into William Hill / AMS technology projects as standard.
