How Sellafield Acquires Specialized Talent To Create A Clean & Sustainable Future

October 31, 2024

Beamery Team

How does Sellafield recruit the strongest possible talent, when required skills are scarce? With a crucial mission and compliance, agility and data quality top of mind, they turned to Beamery.

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Sellafield is a British public sector organization that leads Europe’s largest sustainability and
environmental remediation project focused on nuclear decommissioning and management of nuclear waste produced in the UK.

Challenge

With the mandate to create a clean and safe environment for future generations, Sellafield must recruit the strongest possible talent – but they need to fill a lot of roles, and the relevant skills are scarce.

Sellafield has 12,000 direct headcount and another 40,000 across the supply chain. Much of the work is specialist and project-oriented, and almost entirely based on site in West Cumbria, United Kingdom – which represents a challenge when seeking to efficiently attract (and retain) niche skills.

Limitations in the availability of quality of skills data, as well as the capabilities of the HR tech stack resulted in significant challenges engaging with prospective employees. To combat this, Sellafield needed to develop a skills-based strategy, enabled by technology powerful enough to quickly and accurately identify, engage, and secure suitable candidates with the skills required to be successful in the future.

“We’ve got a hundred year plus mission at Sellafield, and we are going to need skills in the future that probably don’t even exist today. So it’s critical that we maintain relationships with people right through their careers.” – Martin Stubbs, Talent Acquisition Leader, Sellafield Ltd

Approach

Sellafield was looking for a vendor that could lean into compliance, AI, and TA strategy, and act as a true partner.

With compliance, agility and data quality top of mind, Sellafield selected and implemented Beamery to help them build a dynamic workforce planning approach – focused on filling skills gaps as they emerged, in line with new business objectives.

“We genuinely worked as a collaborative and an aligned team right through the implementation process. And what was refreshing was that Beamery took the time to understand Sellafield and understand what we wanted, so that the product we implemented did what we needed it to do.” – Martin Stubbs

By establishing a deeper understanding of their business-critical skills needs, how to target the right profiles, and run the right campaigns, Beamery’s platform enabled Sellafield’s Talent Acquisition teams to drive the best talent into communities that they could effectively engage.

“AI will help us understand how we identify skills that we need… the Beamery platform will really help us have a clear picture of what skills we have, and what skills we need to be successful both today and tomorrow.” – Martin Stubbs

Sellafield also uses the platform to improve the internal employee experience, and enable upward mobility for essential roles, as individuals upskill. The Talent function uses Beamery to find and engage existing employees – or alumni – for relevant open vacancies.

Powerful integrations will ensure there is a smooth flow of job, candidate, and people data between Beamery and SAP Recruiting, so Sellafield can deliver an excellent talent experience across both systems, while optimizing their investments and making TA more efficient.

“Filling critical and hard-to-hire roles is central to our ability to drive our mission at Sellafield. Combining the power and capabilities of SAP and Beamery is how we’ll do that.” – Martin Stubbs

Beamery Solutions

Impact

High quality skills data is now the foundation for the successful identification, engagement and attraction of best-in-class talent for open positions within Sellafield.

By nurturing prospective candidates with personalized experiences and establishing a proactive recruitment marketing strategy focused on cultivating specialized talent which can be engaged at a moment’s notice, Sellafield has significantly reduced time to application and overall time to hire. Further, the streamlining of recruiting workflows and leveraging of automation led to massive efficiency gains.

Beamery has also started to influence the upskilling and reskilling of existing employees, and further reduce time-to-hire through the increase in internal mobility at Sellafield. While Sellafield is improving quality of hire, and reducing risks associated with poor quality talent data, they are starting to see notable retention benefits as well.

In partnership with Beamery, they are seeing the value of optimizing talent decision-making based on business goals, and aligning their talent efforts to meet real world challenges.

“By using the tool to help us generate the campaigns and to build the engagement, it’s generating incredibly fantastic volumes of applications and ultimately we will hire more high quality people with the right skills through Beamery.” – Martin Stubbs