The start of a 'brand’ new journey for bp retail.

bp retail is a convenience business that includes traditional fuel services plus its own coffee shop, Wild Bean Café. They partner with Marks & Spencer’s Simply Food and Deliveroo to offer a comfortable, convenient experience for all their customers.

Providing a quality customer experience across their 300+ service stations has always been key for them. The same goes for their candidate experience – but it became apparent that bp retail wasn’t seen as part of the wider BP brand, and was often mistaken for a Marks and Spencer store.

The team wasn’t receiving the level of applications they needed to meet recruitment demand. To remain competitive, bp retail joined forces with eArcu to increase their brand awareness and improve their candidate experience through back-end efficiencies, large recruitment campaigns, and a rebranded careers site. 

Quality careers sites are incredibly powerful recruitment tools. So when our experts learned that bp retail wanted a site that improved their candidate experience, encouraged quality applications, and increased brand awareness, we knew what to do. 

The new site had to showcase their values, inspiring people and their “one team” inclusive culture. It also had to target their three frontline roles: Store Managers, Assistant Managers, and Customer Service Assistants, which totalled 440 vacancies across the UK.

Starting from scratch, we plotted new creative and written content to reflect what the brand looks and sounds like today. Meanwhile, their recruitment team worked closely with senior stakeholders, Store Managers and People Leads to nail down the core employee experience, building an external awareness of bp retail’s identity, and how their people play into the success of the BP group.

bp retail worked hard to ensure their far-reaching teams and branches were engaged, and bought into the candidate experience. Focus groups were created among their frontline store community to test the candidate journey, ensuring their content was authentic and compelling – a vital component to making smart decisions during the project.

We helped bp retail introduce many fresh features to their recruitment process, including: 

• Quick apply – streamlining the application process 
• Interview self-scheduling – enhancing candidate flexibility
• Managers’ notifications – flagging what stage a candidate is at to reduce delays
• Right to work – eliminating all manual processes in the stores and head office
• Onboarding – automating everything and sending it from the centralised system, allowing candidates to use the integrated e-signature functionality
• Talent attraction campaigns – enabling bp retail to reach new talent

Then, of course, there was the careers site refresh…

The new site shares BP group’s ambition to become a net-zero company, and this doesn’t fall short when it comes to their teams. Through authentic employee stories, testimonials, and training and development opportunities, we helped bp retail showcase their commitment to their people and inclusive culture. A homepage banner displays company benefits, and staff images and values are embedded throughout the site.

bp retail’s aim was to achieve a truer reflection of their brand, and a better candidate experience. We couldn’t be happier that eArcu’s solutions helped them achieve their goals and fuel their vision for excellent customer service across their stores.

Here are just some of results from their new careers site and recruitment campaigns: 

• 42% increase in website visits across all devices
• Automation reduced admin time by an average of 90 minutes per day
• 41.6% rise in applications since the successful completion of the project
• 38.08% rise in applications as a result of the social campaign 
• Candidate applications completed in seconds – previously it took 6+ minutes

With a clean canvas and bold bursts of colour, bp retail’s branding pops from the screen. Their content is now inclusive, concise, engaging, consistent, and oozes authenticity, while the imagery really humanises the brand to give the candidate a genuine experience.