The Phoenix Group story
The financial services industry has a reputation for rigidity. See how Phoenix Group used employee stories to break down this barrier and engage top quality candidates.
The challenge
Phoenix Group is the UK’s largest long-term savings and retirement business and a FTSE-100 listed company. They offer a broad range of pensions and savings products to support people across all stages of the savings life cycle.
In the UK financial services industry, talent acquisition is extremely competitive. To help Phoenix Group attract and engage the best candidates, Jane Avison, Employer Brand Manager, needed a way to help the company stand out from the crowd. Jane and the team wanted to change the way that pensions and insurance are viewed by candidates. Traditionally, the insurance industry has been perceived as corporate and rigid. Jane and the team at Phoenix Group knew that in order to attract and engage the best talent, they needed to break down this barrier and show the true culture of their workplace.
With jobseekers increasingly discerning and less trusting of the polished, corporate ‘About Us’ video, the team sought a way to add authenticity to their messaging —and a tool to help them do it— at scale.
“These days candidates care less and less about that lovely glossy shiny corporate filmed video where your CEO is sat down saying “hey we’re a brilliant company”. That’s great and there’s still a place for that but actually there’s been a huge boom in that more authentic, real content and employee-generated content.”
—Jane Avison, Employer Brand Manager
The focus
To overcome any negative perceptions of the industry, and showcase an authentic picture of work life at Phoenix Group, the team decided to use employee generated content to bring their career site and content to life.
But, the team at Phoenix Group needed a mechanism to easily create and share employee generated content, without consuming too many resources —both to establish and maintain. The solution also needed to address concerns surrounding procurement, supplier onboarding, compliance and data protection.
The solution
Phoenix Group partnered with Clinch for an Employee Connections solution. With live Q&A functionality, discussion forums and the ability for ‘Insiders’ (employee ambassadors) to upload video responses to candidate questions, it became apparent that Employee Connections had exactly the functionality they were looking for.
Plus, with rapid implementation and ongoing support, it was quick and easy to bolt-on to their existing career site.The implementation itself was seamless; supported end-to-end by our client success team, an internal communications campaign and lots of training and resources.
Phoenix Group were easily able to recruit their Insiders, and get them up to speed. The brand is also protected by an additional layer of moderation, so the team can rest easy knowing responses to candidate questions are always appropriate and considerate. Each Insider is generally only asked to answer 1-2 questions per month with the flexibility to pause answering during busy periods. The platform itself only takes Jane 15-20 minutes a week to manage and is already delivering great results.
Phoenix Group have used the discussions created throughout their career site, as well as on job ads, emails and social media. To date (7 months in), each discussion has an average of 39 views. The team have found that many of their newly appointed employees have used the platform prior to interviews to get help and advice on how to do their best —with 100% of discussions voted ‘helpful’ by site visitors. Plus, the leadership team have all reported back favourably that it has helped aid their recruitment. With 16.9% of candidates hitting ‘apply’ after engaging with a discussion, the Phoenix team feel that their Employee Connections solution has really helped them to stand out in a hugely competitive recruitment market
“For us this really answered the question of what you can do that is a bit different, that feels easy, it doesn’t necessarily require a huge amount of budget or resource or time but it really does make a difference.”
