Case study

Transforming Early Careers hiring at Rolls Royce

At a glance

AMS has delivered Early Careers services to Rolls-Royce since 2013. This close partnership was expanded in 2019 as the organisation strived to become a leading Early Careers employer, not just in the UK, but globally. Over the past four years, AMS and Rolls-Royce have worked together to achieve this shared vision.

The challenge

To reach their global ambitions in the Early Careers space, Rolls-Royce needed to progress their strategic approach with bolder, more innovative thinking. The vision set by AMS and Rolls-Royce is continuously evolving based on the needs of the business. Over the past four years, overall objectives included:

  • Achieving first-rate candidate satisfaction and engagement
  • Increasing candidate diversity
  • Creating an efficient, flexible, and scalable Early Careers and Campus model
  • Ensuring operational excellence across the end-to-end process
  • Improving governance (training, KPIs and reviews)

The solution

2019 saw AMS’ partnership with Rolls-Royce expand to a global, end-to-end Early Careers service. Together, the organisations built a scalable, robust model that could quickly react to changing business needs throughout the peaks and troughs of Early Careers hiring seasons and 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). In 2022, a neurodiversity assessment project was launched to provide enhanced adjustments and care to neurodiverse Early Careers candidates, intended to be rolled out 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

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