Building a pioneering career returners program with O2

Challenges

In 2016, the mobile telecoms provider O2 wanted to address a problem now common to many organizations: Given the current and growing talent shortages associated with science, technology, English and mathematics (STEM) skills. O2 and Cielo already enjoyed an ongoing RPO partnership for around 1,000 hires per year in the U.K., with end-to-end responsibility for early careers, graduate and apprentice recruitment.

O2 wanted to safeguard its position as a technology leader by improving sourcing and talent pooling for hard-to-find, specialist roles. Together, O2 and Cielo concluded that pioneering the launch of a career returners program would open a wider pool of talent and help more talent shine, promoting greater diversity, equity and inclusion while building on O2’s success as a flexible employer. 

O2’s research had found that 70% of women fear taking a career break and “stepping off the ladder” simply because they feel it’s too hard to get back on. When they do return, they face a huge amount of bias in terms of gender, age, and a perceived lack of experience. Overall, an estimated 96 million people worldwide are currently on career breaks, and 54 million of these are experienced leaders. 

Together, O2 and Cielo wanted to make a difference (and solve a pressing business need). So, the team decided to create a returners program that’d provide these candidates with the means to enter O2 careers get back into the world of work, bring their skills up to date, and provide a real opportunity to find employment following the program.

Solutions

To fill current and future skills gaps while improving diversity and creating a new way of sourcing talent, O2 and Cielo partnered with an external thought leadership body, Women Returners. Together, the team built a bespoke, tailored 14-week “internship” for senior hires who’ve taken a voluntary career break of between two and 10 years. This included a multi-tier attraction strategy, creating a bespoke page on the Women Returners website, and building up a network of personal contacts from relevant events and conferences. Social media was also key to utilizing both personal and corporate attraction channels to reach parents looking to get back into work via schools.

After telephone screening, shortlisted candidates were invited to attend an assessment day, including a Women Returners workshop on confidence-building after a career break and a Q&A with the COO. Hiring managers and recruiters also ran one-to-one interviews focusing on transferable skills.

Results

The O2 career returners program has provided a real business advantage to O2 by improving access to a broad pool of talent and experience, helping promising candidates enter O2 careers.

The program attracted glowing candidates, with 60 applications received in the first year. Twenty-four returners were invited to assessment centers, which achieved 100% attendance. In 2016, Cielo identified a higher-than-expected number of candidates deemed suitable for the program and doubled initial intake numbers for the program from six to 12.

After successful completion of the program, eight of the 2016 returners were on-boarded into full time O2 careers – a excellent outcome reflecting the high-quality matching of the candidates. Given this success, in 2017 O2’s operations function agreed to run the program for a second year. Three times as many people applied compared to the previous year, with 100% attendance at the assessment day for the second year running. Eight returners were successfully hired for a range of areas including cyber security, customer service and IT.