Transforming campus hiring at Rolls Royce

The solution

AMS’ partnership with Rolls-Royce expanded to a global, end-to-end Early Careers service, with both organizations building a scalable, robust model capable of swiftly adapting to evolving business needs throughout the fluctuations of hiring seasons and the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To support Rolls-Royce’s strategic decisions, AMS oversaw the design, delivery, and continuous evolution of global campaign reporting to provide consistent, up-to-date market data and insights. This included the introduction of the PowerBI platform.

AMS Assessment Consulting led a global assessment re-design across all Rolls-Royce Early Career programmes, aimed at delivering a best-in-class, highly inclusive process that would result in more diverse hires. The solution included bold process changes, including creating a new candidate application form, refreshing online testing, redesigning assessment centres, and enhancing candidate experience through a new virtual AC platform.

To improve strategic decisions around DEI hiring, AMS conducted a diversity diagnostic across the full RPO service (Exp, ECR, Contingent). A neurodiversity assessment project was launched to provide enhanced adjustments and support for neurodiverse Early Careers candidates, with the intention of extending it across all hiring.

In North America, AMS’ partner organisation WayUp was brought in to support the creation of a more diverse hiring pool in key locations.

AMS also implemented solutions to address Rolls-Royce’s EVP and candidate attraction processes. This began with the launch of the ‘Power Series’ – six inspiring, diversity-focussed and informative virtual events. The series featured live speakers, roundtables and live Q&A sessions on the business.

“It is hard to describe the client supplier partnership we have with AMS because the team are so integrated into ours, they just simply are part of Rolls-Royce TA”.

– Rolls-Royce Early Careers Recruitment Lead

The impact

The partnership between AMS and Rolls-Royce has been one of true collaboration, achieving significant results enabled by a well-structured, operationally sound model. Together, AMS and Rolls-Royce are proud to have overseen:

• An improved candidate conversion rate from 40% at final stage interview to 53% globally and 75% in the UK.
• Application screening time reduced from 23 days to less than 2 days globally.
• Improved diversity hiring, with 42% females hired globally in 2022 (up from 28% in 2019) and 39% ethnic diversity (up from 17% in 2019).
• Less than 6% of offers declined annually, with a robust ‘keep warm’ strategy designed and delivered in close partnership.
• Increased hiring manager and candidate satisfaction, reaching 85% and 93% respectively in 2022.
• A multi-award-winning partnership – including at the 2022 ISE, Tiara Recruitment Awards and Recruitment and Marketing Awards, and the 2023 National Graduate Recruitment Awards.
• A strong and enduring relationship, with a four-year contract and renewal for 2024 in progress.

“What has been really beneficial … is the extensive knowledge and collective years of experience that AMS bring to both the design and delivery of our early careers hiring.
At Rolls-Royce, we have the aspiration to be the early career employer of choice, not just in the UK, but globally.
And we’ve refreshed and redesigned how we attract, recruit and onboard our early career talent.
The whole AMS team have played a significant role in shifting us from traditional methods and have been influential in how we assess based on skills and behaviours, embedding technology into our processes, and ultimately improving candidate experience”.

– Rolls Royce Early Careers Recruitment Lead