Raising the Bar on High-Volume Telecoms Recruitment

Situation

PeopleScout has been this telecommunications provider’s recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) partner since 2011, supporting high-volume hiring across field engineering, field sales, customer service, and retail.

When this client reset its strategic priorities following an acquisition, hiring sat at the center of almost all of them. We were delivering good candidates, but the business wanted them faster, assessed more consistently, and with an experience that better reflected the brand.

PeopleScout’s response was to propose rebuilding the model rather than adjusting it. It required a step change: a fundamental rethink of how recruitment was designed, delivered and measured, so that PeopleScout could show up as the strategic partner the client needed.

Solution

The starting point was an honest conversation. Both teams sat down and talked candidly about the existing processes, the recruitment technology ecosystem, and what a realistic workload looks like when you want people doing their best work.

Rebuilding the foundation

We mapped every workstream end to end, looking for anywhere that candidates dropped out, handoffs slowed things down and recruiter time was going to avoidable admin. Real-time pipeline dashboards gave both teams the same view of the same data. A priority and hard-to-fill tagging system focused effort where it mattered most.

We also expanded multi-country delivery across our centers in Poland and India, and stood up a dedicated offers and onboarding team. Separating offer administration from recruiting reduced errors, improved consistency, and gave recruiters their time back to connect with candidates and hiring managers.

From telephone screening to on-demand video

The single most consequential change was to candidate assessment. We replaced telephone interviews with on-demand video interviews, which candidates complete at a time that suits them, available immediately after applying.

Removing scheduling as a barrier gave every candidate equal and immediate access to assessment regardless of geography or availability. It also produced richer insight. A phone interview captures voice alone. Video lets hiring managers assess energy, presentation and body language, which matter enormously when recruiting customer-facing retail roles. Every candidate answers the same questions in the same format, which reduces variability between interviewers. And because hiring teams review responses asynchronously, the scheduling bottleneck disappears entirely.

The impact was immediate. Interview attendance improved by 27 percentage points. Average time to offer in field sales fell from 16.6 days to 9.5. Recruiter admin time per candidate dropped from 15 minutes to 8.

Raising the level of the partnership

A stable operating model created room to do more than deliver. We introduced a Talent Acquisition Partner layer into the RPO structure, promoting four PeopleScout recruiters into roles designed to bring proactive workforce planning, market intelligence, and continuous process improvement into every client conversation.

The effect compounded. A more senior team built better stakeholder relationships, surfaced opportunities, and earned talent acquisition a seat at the table as a business partner rather than a back-office function.

Scope expanded alongside it. We delivered 32 hires in four and a half weeks through a complex change program in field operations, absorbing several late-stage changes from client stakeholders along the way. A separate hiring project filled 49 retail roles ahead of Black Friday, with new hires starting within four weeks.

Our Talent Advisory team also ran a targeted recruitment marketing campaign to increase the representation of women in field technician roles. It generated 4 million impressions and 55,800 clicks, with click share from women reaching 32% on Meta and 58% on Google Display Network. It also proved something useful: attraction was no longer the limiting factor, which shifted the conversation to barriers further down the funnel that were able to address with the client.

Results

• 96% average fulfillment rate, exceeding the SLA target
• Every SLA metric now met in full
• Candidate NPS improved by 46 points in a single year
• Time to offer in field sales down 42%, from 16.6 days to 9.5
• Retail time to offer down from 38 days to 12
• Full-year average time to offer of 15.4 working days, against an 18-day target
• Contract renewed for a further three years

Fourteen years into a partnership, the measure of its strength isn’t whether challenges arise. It’s how both sides respond when they do. When this client’s ambitions grew, we grew our model to match: new technology, a restructured team, and a higher level of service. With the partnership renewed, the next chapter is already underway.