Raising recruitment accuracy in Cable and Wireless

In 2005 Cable & Wireless set out on a new mission to turn around their ailing global telecommunications business. Although public results remained positive, underneath C&W were struggling to adapt to the new competition and growing customer expectations. And at some point soon that was going to be reflected in sales and profit.

At the sharp end were sales and service teams. Chemistry were asked to help C&W transform sales and service capability. We worked with C&W gathering input from customers, managers and high performers to build a description of what great looked like in these roles. It turned out that existing assessment and recruitment was at best 25% accurate. So we applied our Talent Model:

Despite the original beliefs of the C&W managers, we showed that experience wasn’t an important predictor of future success, but other characteristics were. We built assessment and recruitment processes to ensure that the right people were in the right roles.

Chemistry assessed new candidates for roles (internal and eternal) for 6 months. We trained C&W HR and line managers  and now C&W run assessment and recruitment themselves. C&W HR and managers are confident that their assessment and recruitment processes are now over 75% accurate in predicting the future success of someone in role. And that is feeding in to improving sales and growing profits.