Recruitment isn’t an endurance test – universities should stop treating it like one

Universities are good at introducing things. Another approval, another form, another policy, another stage designed to reduce risk or improve quality.

Each individual change makes sense. Collectively, they can create processes that are slower, more complicated and harder to navigate than anyone ever intended.

Recruitment is a good example of this. When we began transforming ours, we realised that our application process often took well over an hour to complete. The implicit belief was understandable – if someone really wanted to work here, they would invest the time.

Somewhere along the way, we began to equate effort with commitment. But what if we weren’t measuring commitment at all? What if we were simply measuring who had an hour to spare? This change of perspective was vital to our success.

Challenging that assumption became an important part of our transformation.

Start by finding friction

We weren’t trying to make applying for a job easier for the sake of it. We were trying to answer a much bigger question: how do we attract the very best people?

That meant looking at recruitment from the candidate’s perspective and questioning which parts of the process genuinely helped us make better hiring decisions.

Other universities can do the same. Experience your recruitment process as an applicant would. Time how long it takes. Look at what information you ask candidates to provide, particularly where you ask for the same information more than once. Identify where people abandon applications and listen to recent applicants and hiring managers about the parts of the process they find unnecessarily difficult.

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For every stage, ask a simple question: does this help us make a better hiring decision, or is it here because it has always been here?

We redesigned the application process around removing unnecessary barriers while maintaining robust assessment where it actually mattered. Today, applying for many roles takes around four minutes rather than more than an hour.

The result wasn’t a decline in quality – quite the opposite.

The number of applicants increased by 450 per cent and time-to-hire reduced by 44 per cent. Recruitment costs fell by 26 per cent in a year, including a £6.5 million reduction in agency spend. At the same time, we improved diversity outcomes, including significantly more senior women, disabled colleagues and staff from diverse ethnic backgrounds joining UCL.

Those figures matter, but not simply because they represent operational improvements. They revealed something more fundamental about how universities design processes.

Good intentions can create unintended barriers

Universities rightly care about rigour. We operate in complex regulatory environments and make decisions that have long-term consequences for our institutions.

Yet there is a difference, even if a subtle one, between designing for quality and designing for complexity.

Processes evolve incrementally. Requirements can simply accumulate. Technology can change and policies can get layered on to existing systems. Before long, nobody remembers whether each stage still serves its original purpose.

One way to expose this is to map the recruitment journey from the perspective of the person using it rather than the team administering it. For every form, approval and hand-off, ask what risk it manages, what value it adds and what would happen if it disappeared.

Attracting and retaining outstanding people is a strategic issue for universities. If we want the best researchers, educators and professional services colleagues to choose our institutions, we need to scrutinise whether the processes designed to recruit them are helping or hindering us.

Put evidence before tradition

One of the most valuable aspects of our transformation was discovering how often data contradicted accepted wisdom.

Recruitment channels are a good example. Like many universities, we had established ways of advertising vacancies that felt familiar and trusted. But familiarity doesn’t necessarily mean effectiveness.

We began looking more closely at what different channels actually delivered: their reach, the quality and relevance of candidates, conversion and cost. That allowed us to make more evidence-based decisions about where to invest our recruitment spend – as with our application process. 

For other institutions, the lesson is not necessarily to stop using a particular platform or copy our recruitment model. It is to establish what outcome you expect from each part of your recruitment process, measure whether it delivers that outcome, and be prepared to change course when the evidence challenges a long-held assumption.

By asking what is working rather than what have we always done, we can move recruitment from being viewed primarily as an administrative process towards a strategic capability: reaching a broader talent pool, improving candidate experience, filling vacancies more quickly and making better use of finite resources.

Connect recruitment to what the university is trying to achieve 

Perhaps the biggest lesson is that recruitment should never be viewed in isolation. 

Universities invest enormous effort in developing research, teaching and innovation strategies, but this all comes down to attracting, retaining and developing talented people. 

Beyond simply filling vacancies, recruitment is about the skills and capabilities available to our teams, how quickly new colleagues can contribute and ultimately whether universities have the people they need to deliver their ambitions.

It needs to be considered alongside workforce planning, development, performance and retention rather than treated as a stand-alone HR process.

In practice, this means starting conversations earlier. Instead of waiting until a vacancy appears, recruitment and HR teams can work with academic and professional services leaders to understand what capabilities they will need, where recruitment is proving difficult, which skills already exist within the organisation and when developing or redeploying existing colleagues might be a better answer than external recruitment.

It also changes how we communicate about recruitment. A new process should not be explained simply in terms of what hiring managers now need to do. We need to connect it to outcomes they care about: attracting outstanding colleagues, getting people into roles more quickly, enabling research and education, and making the best use of university resources.

Remove what no longer adds value

Our recruitment transformation has shown that redesigning recruitment isn’t simply an HR improvement; it can be an organisational one.

Simplifying our candidate journey has coincided with a much larger applicant pool, faster hiring, lower costs and improved diversity outcomes. But perhaps the most useful lesson isn’t about recruitment at all.

Whenever we redesign a university process, we should ask if it adds value or whether it’s just become familiar. Sometimes the biggest improvement comes not from adding another requirement, but from having the confidence to take one away!

Angela Goff is the director of Talent Acquisition at UCL.

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