London 2012 - Engaging talent communities for the UK's largest recruitment project

The Background

The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games was an outstanding success and is widely recognised as a model of exceptional employee engagement and customer service. The Games were also acknowledged as the UK’s biggest peacetime recruitment project ever!

The London Organising Committee for 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) needed to rapidly embark upon a 200,000 person hiring project with some unique challenges. In particular, for the core workforce of 4,500 staff, how to retain talent in a unique situation.

The Challenge

LOCOG had the demanding job of recruiting, motivating, and retaining a large project workforce when all employees knew from day one, that their jobs were temporary and would cease to exist once the project had finished.

Historically every Olympic Games has had the very difficult challenge of retaining their workforce leading up the games themselves. Much of the workforce work for 4 years prior to the event in some capacity, however leading up to the games with 6 months or so left of their contract employees start to look around for their next opportunity.

In previous games the organisers were seeing around 50% of their workforce leaving around this time and were faced with huge issues around consistency, continuity, loss of knowledge and the constant need to firefight.

LOCOG knew that the key to a successful and outstanding games was to ensure exceptional employee engagement. As a result, they made staff retention one of their key focus areas and embarked on an innovative project to reduce that huge 50% attrition rate.

The Solution

LOCOG worked with Hollaroo to give their employees a unique opportunity to engage with future employers, partners and sponsors to prepare them for the next step in their career. A chance to engage outside of the short term and pressured environment of the classic job focused process.

They invited all employees into the Hollaroo network community along with their partners, suppliers and sponsors to create a space for them to engage. Whether it was advice on how to present yourself in an interview, write a CV or promote a job opportunity for when the games ended. The community was designed to make employees feel comfortable and not panic as their contract end date drew nearer.

From an employer’s perspective they were provided with an excellent space to nurture prospective employees, showcase their brand and build a talent pipeline of great people, with the condition that that they didn’t employ staff until the games had ended. One of the partners, BA took this one step further and put candidates through the selection process, so they were all ready to employ them once the games had finished and an appropriate opportunity arose.

With a network of 552 employers, the Hollaroo platform was a forward thinking and unusual initiative! To engage with employees just before they were leaving an organisation was way before it’s time and showed there was an appetite for employers and employees to explore engagement long before discussing an actual job role.

The community was set up and each employer had their own group within that community. Other groups were set up around areas of interest, for example Project Management or LGBTQ. Prospective candidates could then choose the groups they wanted to join to further engage with an employer or an area of interest. Employers could also set up subgroups, for example Barclays set up an LGBTQ group to further showcase their commitment to diversity and inclusion, challenge perceptions and show people in a considered fashion what they were doing.

The Results

Owning and managing their own talent relationships in one private social recruiting network enabled London 2012 to achieve the astonishingly low level of attrition of just 3% in the year leading up to the games. The committee firmly believe this contributed to the phenomenal success of the Olympics.

The 552 employers using London 2012’s Network made huge cost savings, in fact they saved in excess of £7,000,000 in recruitment costs by building a longer-term pipeline of talent, engaging with them and having people readily available when the jobs arose!

But one of the proudest achievements was all diversity targets were surpassed with 46% women, 40% ethnic minorities and 9% with disabilities in the Games workforce.