Cutting hiring time by 57%: Motorpoint's journey in automotive retail

Motorpoint is the UK’s leading independent retailer of nearly new and used cars. Founded in 1998, the business has 20 stores across the UK and offers customers a multi-channel car buying experience.  

With hundreds of employees based across the UK, Motorpoint is a people-powered business committed to changing the face of the UK automotive retail industry through progressive hiring practices. The talent team has worked closely with hiring managers to encourage recruitment to be based on values and ability rather than automotive retail experience.  

One of these practices has involved utilising a trainee model for junior hires within the sales team - the business is able to make sure new hires are getting the level of support and training needed to give them the best chance of succeeding in a new industry.  

This approach has played a significant role in helping Motorpoint implement more inclusive and diverse hiring practices and allowed the business to tap into talent that would otherwise not have made it past the initial screening process.   

With this in mind, the Teamtailor team wanted to discover more about how Motorpoint were able to reach the point of implementing these unique hiring practices and challenge pre-conceptions hiring managers might have about the ‘perfect candidate’. 

Recruitment challenges 

Before implementing Teamtailor, Motorpoint already had an ATS, however, it didn’t offer the functionality needed to help the talent team meet their wider recruitment objectives.   

Motorpoint was looking to reduce time to hire, improve employee retention rates and streamline the process to ensure all candidates have the best experience – from application to offer. 

As Luke Chapman, Head of Talent Acquisition at Motorpoint, explains: “Historically, recruitment at Motorpoint could be quite slow, which meant we risked missing out on candidates to organisations who could fill vacancies faster. Not to mention, that it didn’t present the business in the best light."  

As a small three-person talent team, it was clear that we needed an ATS that gave us full autonomy over the recruitment process and could do a lot of the heavy lifting for us.

“Our old ATS was outdated and required a lot of additional work to get it to function how we needed. For example, any applicants who applied on platforms other than the website needed to be manually added to the ATS – which wasn’t practical for a business of our size." 

“We recruit for a variety of roles across our store, prep and head office locations meaning that the process can look very different depending on the role we are looking to fill. We needed a flexible system that allowed us to build multiple workflows to ensure recruitment runs smoothly irrespective of what the individual process looked like.” 

With Luke having implemented Teamtailor in previous roles, he was already aware that the system could help solve some of Motorpoint's recruitment challenges.  

Some of the main features that stood out to the team were: 

• The ability to anonymise applications and prevent unconscious bias was important to Motorpoint and its ongoing efforts to change the face of automotive retailing.
• Seamless integration with LinkedIn and other job boards, as Motorpoint’s old ATS lacked outreach functionality which made it difficult to attract candidates.
• Full control over the career site meaning that the talent team no longer had to raise a ticket with IT if they needed changes made to the website. 
• Wanted to improve the candidate journey by streamlining the recruitment process and improving communication with applicants. 

Key results

Beyond helping Motorpoint develop a candidate-centric recruitment process, the implementation of Teamtailor has helped:  

• Reduced time to hire by 57% 
• Saved hundreds of thousands of pounds in hiring costs  
• Increased employee retention by 39%

Teamtailor has had a positive impact on Motorpoint’s candidate journey. It’s allowed the team to implement a swim lane model, making it easier to keep track of exactly where each role is up to in the hiring process. This is particularly important for a business like Motorpoint where the talent team could be working with up to 40 hiring managers at any given time.  

One major metric that has improved is the reduction in time to hire, which has more than halved since using Teamtailor. Not only are candidates having a better experience when applying for roles but they’re moving through the process much more efficiently.  

By utilising automation available within the platform, Motorpoint has ensured that candidates are kept up-to-date on the status of their applications. By utilising a combination of templated and personalised emails, the talent team can ensure that each candidate receives appropriate and considered responses. 

Having a career site that is part of the ATS but fits Motorpoint’s brand guidelines has also been a game changer for the team. 

As Luke explains: “In the past, our careers website had been managed by the IT department, which meant that we had to rely on them to make any changes or set jobs live. As you can imagine, this wasn’t ideal and could slow things down."  

Through Teamtailor, we’ve been able to become so much more proactive and can now self-serve – meaning that things can be actioned immediately, while also freeing up resource within the IT team.

“An unexpected benefit we’ve seen since moving our careers site over to Teamtailor has been how much better it performs in organic search. We’ve seen our job listing pages surface organically for the first time which is helping drive applications and reducing the need for proactive outreach.”

Retention rate and quality of hire 

Both staff retention and quality of hire have improved considerably since onboarding Teamtailor towards the end of 2022.  

Motorpoint has seen a significant reduction in annual staff turnover with almost three-quarters of new hires staying with the company for at least 12 months. The talent team predict that this improvement in staff retention rates equates to a saving of hundreds of thousands of pounds in hiring costs.

Candidates are not only staying with the business longer, but it’s clear that Motorpoint is hiring the right people into the right roles.  

From speaking directly with hiring managers, Motorpoint has seen a significant improvement in the quality of hires since reworking its recruitment process. This is not only reflected in feedback from across the business, but also the fact that its Rising Stars programme, designed to nurture new talent is busier than ever.   

A successful recruitment process is...

Discussing what a successful recruitment process looks like at Motorpoint, Luke said: “For us, we want the recruitment process to be fast and transparent. We encourage hiring managers to set realistic timelines and communicate any delays to candidates, as we don’t want candidates to ever wonder where they are up to in the process." 

We very much view recruitment as a two-way street and believe it’s as much for candidates to learn about the business as it is for us to learn about candidates.

"Recently, we’ve been working hard to educate hiring managers about the importance of feedback and how to provide unsuccessful candidates with constructive advice that can help them with their job search.  

At a basic level, we view success by whether or not a candidate leaves the process with a positive impression of brand - irrespective of whether or not they secured the role.” 

Future goals

Motorpoint is continually looking for ways to improve its recruitment process and is using Teamtailor to ensure that candidates have the best experience possible at every stage of the recruitment journey.  

To do this, the team plans to add ‘a day in the life’ style videos to job ads to make it easier for candidates to visualise what their role could look like day-to-day, understand what will be asked during the recruitment process, and offering applicants the option of receiving communication from the talent team over WhatsApp.  

Luke Chapman, Head of Talent Acquisition at Motorpoint said: “It doesn’t matter if your business has an older ATS or is looking to implement one for the first time."   

If you want a feature-rich, UI-centric ATS that is simple to use for both talent acquisition and management, then I’d suggest Teamtailor.   

“Having onboarded Teamtailor as part of roles previously and lead the implementation at Motorpoint, I know how it can help solve a variety of recruitment challenges. For us, having full control over the careers website and ability to utilise this level of automation has been an absolute game changer.”

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