The Background

A critical focus on having the 'Best People'

Andrew joined Entain as their Group Director of Talent Acquisition in Mid 2023 to bring some consistency and global scalability to the recruitment function of what has been a highly acquisitive organisation. Multiple acquisitions have resulted in many legacy systems and processes remaining in the business, leading to a lack of congruence in how the Group attracted, onboarded and retained talent.

His strategy included a critical focus on having the ‘Best People’. For Andrew, this means more than just finding, recruiting and retaining the best. It was an important cultural objective too. He wanted to enable his people to be the best version of themselves, to always have clear visibility of their opportunities and career path, and to receive enrichment in the form of training and personal development. If the team recruiting new talent aren’t operating at their best, how can they be expected to attract the best, most diverse talent?

Helping Entain plc discover talent and map potentials with our CoActive Assessment®

The project

There were two key strands to the project:

• identifying and prioritising the skills and behaviours most closely aligned with success in Andrew's future organisation;
• assessing the team against these, alongside their understanding and motivations towards the future organisation.

HR Biscuit undertook a 360-degree assessment process which included:

• Cognitive and behavioural assessments using Arctic Shores’ Una platform;
• A CoActive Assessment® individual task that tested motivation, commercial acumen, creativity and critical thinking;
• A CoActive Assessment® interview that looked at current level of skills acquisition and ability to develop the core, interpersonal and leadership skills needed to deliver Andrew’s ‘Best People’ objective;
• A personality profile focused on preferred working patterns and styles.

The process meant speaking to around 65 people across 4 main geographical hubs and our background in HR consultancy combined with our CoActive Assessment® app made this an efficient and structured process which yielded a huge volume of both macro and micro information.

We were able to identify geographical differences as well as identifying individuals with high potential. This then facilitated decisions about how best to structure and develop Andrew’s team for future success. Additionally, team managers were given 360-degree feedback, on their team to enable them to create individual development plans and provide the necessary future support for each employee.

The Outcomes

Andrew’s clear vision was to develop a ‘People First’ culture and this remained a consistent thread throughout the project.

His view was that, to achieve this, his team needed to understand what great talent looked like and have the ability and foresight to focus on diverse and effective interviewing in order to achieve the skills-first hiring he wanted the business to be known for.

Because the data was collected consistently, it could be scored on a common scale which gave real context to capabilities, skills, and experience both individually and geographically, as well as the team’s understanding of, and motivation towards a People First culture.

This process also provided some unexpected but very useful insights on where there were particular skills and behaviour trends.

Andrew described HR Biscuit’s role in this project as “critical”. He knew that using CoActive Assessment® would ensure people didn’t feel they were being interviewed for their own job, but instead would allow open, fair and consistent conversations to take place about motivation, skills, values and experience.