Case study
Raising the Bar
How PeopleScout Transformed High-Volume Recruitment for One of the UK’s Largest Telecoms Businesses
The Challenge
PeopleScout has been Virgin Media O2’s RPO partner since 2011, supporting high-volume hiring across field engineering, field sales, customer services, and retail. Over time, Virgin Media O2’s strategic priorities evolved, placing greater demands on speed, quality, and candidate experience than the existing recruitment model could deliver.
Relying on telephone interviews, manual coordination, and disconnected data systems created operational friction. What was once a workable process became a bottleneck, putting strain on a valued long-term partnership. Resolving this required a complete rebuild across people, process, and technology to transition PeopleScout from an operational delivery function into a strategic talent partner.
The Creative Solution
The transformation began with honest dialogue surrounding fragmented processes, data gaps, and technology constraints. The teams redesigned the recruitment model from the ground up across three phases.
Stage 1: Fixing the Foundation
Data & Process Optimisation
Mapped every workstream end-to-end, resolved 170 data discrepancies, deployed real-time pipeline dashboards, and implemented a priority tagging system.
Global Model Expansion
Expanded delivery across Poland and Gurgaon, transitioning administrative workflows to Gurgaon to free up Polish teams for high-value candidate and client engagement.
Specialised Structuring
Restructured the Retail team and created a dedicated Offers and Onboarding team in Kraków, separating offer administration from recruiting to reduce errors and improve consistency.
Assessment Transformation
Replaced slow telephone interviews with Video-on-Demand (VOD) assessment. Candidates gained immediate, equal access to complete interviews asynchronously. VOD improved candidate evaluation by capturing non-verbal cues (energy, body language) while standardising questions to reduce interviewer bias.
The impact was immediate
0
Interview attendance increased
0
Field Sales average time to offer fell
from 16.6 to 9.53 days0
Recruiter admin time per candidate dropped by nearly half
from 15 minutes to 8Stage 2: From Recovery to Innovation & Expansion
Tech Optimisation
Evaluated and deployed a cost-effective VOD platform alongside pre-interview skills assessment tools in Retail and Customer Services.
Rapid Deployment
Delivered 32 Field Operations hires in 4.5 weeks through complex business changes. Filled 49 Retail roles ahead of Black Friday within 4 weeks, achieving a 2:1 interview pass rate (down from 4:1).
Targeted Attraction
Launched a social media campaign to increase female representation in Field Tech, generating 4 million impressions, 55,800 clicks, and driving female click share to 32% on Meta and 58% on Google Display Network.
Stage 3: Investing in the Partnership
Talent Acquisition Partner (TAP) Model
Promoted four recruiters into TAP roles to elevate delivery from transactional hiring to insight-led consulting.
Strategic Value
Embedded proactive workforce planning, deep market intelligence, precise demand forecasting, and tailored candidate strategies for hard-to-fill locations directly into client interactions.
The Results
The transformation delivered results that were immediate, measurable and sustained. Now, every SLA metric is met in full. Virgin Media O2 renewed their contract for three more years, and the Hiring Managers are giving us an NPS score of 100 – the clearest possible measure of how far the relationship had come.
| Metric | Before Transformation | After Transformation |
| Fulfilment Rate | 78% | 96% (exceeding 95% SLA) |
| Candidate NPS | −32 | +14 (+46 point increase) |
| Hiring Manager NPS | 33 | 100 |
| Field Sales Time to Offer | 16.6 days | 9.53 days (42% reduction) |
| Retail Time to Offer | 38 days | 12 days |
| Full-Year Avg Time to Offer | Above target | 15.4 working days (beat 18-day SLA) |
Partnering through challenge and transformation allowed PeopleScout to raise service quality while delivering significant cost efficiencies. Virgin Media O2 renewed the RPO contract for three additional years, securing a scalable foundation for future talent acquisition.
