Prioritising candidate experience and reducing hiring time with Whyte & Mackay

Born in Glasgow and made in Scotland and a passionate community dedicated to making exceptional Scotch since 1844, Whyte & Mackay is a global leader in whisky. The organisation is home to a collection of multi-award-winning whisky brands, including The Dalmore, Fettercairn, Jura, and Tamnavulin.

Whyte & Mackay was founded with a vision to create a superior Scotch for the thriving community of Glasgow. Today, that belief in creating connection and community holds true as the purpose in all that they do. Their goal is to be a driving force in the whisky industry, renowned for their ability to build brands that truly stand out.

Hiring in the beverage manufacturing industry 

Whyte & Mackay has always been interested in hiring great, diverse talent and we’re really open to the background, industry and experience that the candidate comes from.  We actively try to remove as many barriers to talent as we can. 

There will always be roles where having whisky experience is important but where it’s not required, we’re keen to bring the outside in and learn from other industries.

Recruitment pain points

I joined Whyte and Mackay in January 2023 and from the outside looking in, it wasn’t clear who Whyte and Mackay were as an employer - I could find very little about the culture and what it felt like to work there. 

When looking at what was in place around recruitment, we had a very thorough process, but it was all managed via spreadsheets and Microsoft Outlook.  We had significant agency spend from across the organisation and no ATS, career site or dedicated recruiter.

Choosing Teamtailor

After an extensive search of ATS providers, the key elements that attracted us to Teamtailor were the functionality, the user experience and the commercials.

Teamtailor's ATS gives us everything we need, from managing the requisition and sign-off process, through to integrating AI into the advertising and assessment aspects, alongside integrations such as Thomas International and Zinc which streamline our HR processes. On top of that, the user experience for HR, Recruitment, our colleagues and hiring managers is positive as it’s intuitive, straightforward and requires limited upskilling, which has led to a quick adoption rate across the organisation.

There are so many metrics that you can tie to recruitment and we’re very much focussed on those that really matter. Ultimately we want to ensure our process is a positive experience for our hiring managers and candidates no matter the outcome, that it feels like it has moved with pace and that we attract diverse, credible talent to consider a career at Whyte and Mackay. 

I’m really pleased with our overall time to hire, sitting at 35 days. I’m delighted with the quality of hire metric that’s now available in the system and we’re looking at how we utilise the feedback metrics next year. Overall, the efficacies we have seen in our team, moving away from manual non-value add activity and now allowing us to utilise that time on more value-add activity, has increased the value we add to the business but more importantly, job satisfaction within the team.

The career site and candidate journey

Having started out without a career site, we’re obviously now in a completely different place. We’re taking a phased approach with our career site, ensuring we share the key information candidates want to know. It’s really straightforward to add and amend information on the site. An example was that we were able to create a mini site for our recent intern recruitment which was great. It’s also really powerful to see the analytics of how many people are visiting the site and viewing which pages.

The candidate experience is super important to us and Teamtailor has allowed us to make sure each touchpoint is as personalised as it can be to the candidate, no matter the role they are applying for. It’s been a game changer for our recruitment process.

Click here to check out Whyte & Mackay's career site!

Utilising Co-pilot

Co-pilot is a great feature and one where we’re taking our time to test and learn.  It’s certainly useful to sense check our adverts or come up with potential interview questions based on the advert. 

This is still a feature we’re getting to grips with but the fact we have access to this kind of AI already is great as I’m sure we’ll utilise it more as we go forward.

What does a successful recruitment process look like to you?

Experience, speed and quality of talent pool.

Next steps and recommending Teamtailor

We’re actively looking at how we can make our contract creation and onboarding process more efficient and user-friendly by utilising the integrations and workflows on Teamtailor.

We’ve already had great success of removing manual reference checks and improving turnaround times for right to work checks by using Zinc (which integrates with Teamtailor). We’re now looking at e-signature partners and digital documents to again remove manual work from our team.

There are a lot of great ATS products out in the marketplace, but what stood Teamtailor apart was how much functionality was available as part of the core package, how easy it was to navigate, and the overall user experience. It’s also a system where we found it to be extremely competitive on what it offers vs others in the market.