United Biscuits (UB) is one of the world’s pre-eminent branded snacks businesses. The company manufactures some of the best known sweet and savoury snacks. Its portfolio of brands has been meeting consumer needs for well over 100 years and includes such favourites as McVitie’s, Jacob’s, Carr’s, McCoy’s, Hula Hoops, McVitie’s Jaffa Cakes, KP, Mini Cheddars, go ahead!, Verkade, Sultana, BN, and Delacre. UB holds leading or strong number two positions in its core markets of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Ireland. It also has a rapidly growing international business unit serving consumers from North America to the Middle East, India, Africa, and Australia.

In the autumn of 2009 United Biscuits decided that it needed a new approach to sourcing graduates. Ochre House and UB collaborated to develop a campaign which would deliver over 20 high calibre recruits in 2010. It was important to highlight UB’s household brands, to increase engagement and position UB as an ‘Employer of Choice’. Turnaround time was extremely tight in order to align with the UK graduate recruiting calendar. Ochre House recommended the development and implementation of a new, more informative and compelling website aimed at graduates, which would speak to them in the right tone of voice, focusing less on UB and more on what joining UB would do for their career. Traffic would be driven to the site through an integrated marketing campaign, including targeted advertising and networking, embracing social media, niche job boards, university career portals and targeted e-shots, highlighting UB’s immediately recognisable brands.

The full campaign was launched in December 2009, driving relevant and targeted traffic to the graduate site and delivering over 1100 applications. 196 candidates were shortlisted and put through a comprehensive assessment centre process and 23 high calibre appointments were made, providing the full graduate intake for 2010.

On the back of this success, UB commissioned an additional piece of technology work, this time engaging Ochre House to enhance its complete online careers capability. Ochre House developed a new careers site that seamlessly complemented its corporate parent and the Graduate Site, though hosted by Ochre House. Built with the candidate experience in mind, the site is also backed up by a best of breed applicant tracking system, TalentLink, also configured by Ochre House. This provides end-to-end management of the whole resourcing process.

Impressed, once again, with Ochre House’s technology capability and solutions, UB then asked us [Ochre House] to create a new site to support learning and development across the company. This site needed to be accessible to employees working from both a UB locations and also from their homes. In line with the graduate and careers sites, Ochre House provided an outsourced solution, hosting the site externally but providing high levels of security to protect the potentially sensitive nature of the information and resources that the site would need to hold.

• A dedicated graduate recruitment site backed up by highly effective marketing and capable of delivering the company’s full annual graduate intake, used for the 2010 and 2011 graduate recruitment campaigns
• A flexible and intuitive corporate careers site capable of handling recruitment at all levels across the company. Potential candidates have access to a complete job search facility and easy to use application processes managed by a joint UB/Ochre House consultancy team.
• A secure learning and development site providing support and resources to employees at all levels right across United Biscuits
• The Ochre House and Internal UB Recruitment Team won the UB “Innovation in HR” award for 2011 against stiff competition from three other internal teams for building, developing and managing UB’s online presence

“During the last 18 months Ochre House has supported United Biscuits on a number of technology projects. On all these projects they have provided an excellent level of technical expertise and delivered pragmatic solutions that have matched our requirements and budget.”

Kate Shaw, Sourcing Director, United Biscuits