How Shell Revolutionised its Graduate Recruitment Process

Via Jeroen de Weerd, Vice President Recruitment at Shell

Each year around 100,000 candidates across the globe apply to Shell’s Graduate Programme. With limited roles available in the programme each year, it isn’t hard to imagine the work needed to find the very best amongst the candidates for Shell. We aim to find a diverse range of people from different backgrounds and areas of study to match with real roles, whilst ensuring turnaround times are fast and candidate experience is positive. An ever-more important task, because the Graduate Programme supplies most of our future leaders. Leaders we need to deliver our strategy to lead in the energy transition.

Retirement of a beloved yet outdated process

The Graduate recruitment process had been around for several decades, and has been a hallmark of entry into Shell, bringing thousands of high potential colleagues into the organisation, fuelling our talent pipeline. However, it came with a couple of downsides:

• Diminishing evidence that the assessment methodology resulted in the very best possible candidates, now and in the long run.
• Too slow for our candidates and time consuming for our business.

In short, the aspiration was set to collaborate with students, businesses and assessment experts to really raise the bar with a new redesign that would set a course for future years of graduate talent.

Embracing new technologies

In 2017 our new Graduate recruitment process went live with radical changes that have quickly proven their worth.  A shift was made to dramatically simplify the global application form, ensure it was fun and intuitive for candidates through their tablet or smart phone, and through a simple set of self-selection questions qualify themselves for an online assessment and on-demand video interview. The assessment stages were co-designed between our in-house assessment solutions team and external advisors with regular touch-points to hear from student focus groups how it would be received. Imperative in the redesign was to look at what were common characteristics of a broad range of current Shell people who were outstanding performers, then chose assessments that valued these characteristics. For us that meant Capacity – to understand new situations, synthesise different information sources and reach conclusions, Achievement – the extent to which individuals set goals for themselves, learn from mistakes and work to improve, and Relationships – the values and preferences of how people like to work. We call this our C-A-R framework.

The result is a process of three online assessments that the candidate can do anywhere and takes a total of around 40 mins. There is a cognitive stage, a work styles personality questionnaire and a self-recorded video by candidates answering competency questions from our graduates. Having passed the online assessments and screened as a high-fit for one of Shell’s specific graduate jobs, a candidate is then invited to the final assessment, which is a live video interview with two Shell Assessors.  This final stage begins with a detailed briefing during the week before with the Shell recruitment team and the release of specific case materials depicting fictional events that mirror real Shell business situations with technical and commercial challenges. On the day itself, the video call goes for around two hours. The Assessors spend a little time describing themselves and their careers. At least one of these is from the relevant business area that the candidate is being considered for. The second Assessor is deliberately from a non-related area of the business to bring diversity of perspective. The candidate presents their conclusions on the case study and has a structured interview. Within one day a verbal outcome is given to the candidate with specific feedback talked through with them on how they went.

Instant results

Since its launch in April 2017 the first 70,000 candidates have gone through the process, and the results so far are promising:

• A strong correlation between scores on the different assessments stage including the live video interview, which indicates strong predictive validity
• A factor 4 improvement in cycle time from assessment completion to verbal offer
• Candidate feedback has improved

To learn more about the new graduate recruitment process and to watch the new process get explained, click here