Play

About :

Play Consulting is a digital product innovation studio on a mission to create playful experiences that inspire. It’s built on the belief that game approaches can be used for more than just trading money for virtual candy – but to realise human potential and meaning at work.

Founded in 2014, Play’s grown into an A-team of 38 Players, with alumni of EA, Playfish and Mind Candy, all headquartered in London Bridge. The studio includes all the talent needed to conceive, build and ship a modern live service, from product design and development to QA, dev ops and project management.

As well as building engaging products for clients, Play also creates its own IP – the first of which is Totem, a mobile-first culture platform that drives communication, recognition and performance at work. Totem is growing rapidly and is used by forward-thinking companies like Vodafone, John Lewis, Coca Cola, Leeds Building Society and PwC, to name just a few.

Challenge :

Play had used both internal recruiters and agencies in the past, but found that both of these options lacked consistency and didn’t deliver the desired results. Too often, the agencies they used were not cost-effective, causing the business to spend a lot of unnecessary money on recruitment.

Whilst Play liked having an internal function that understood its brand and culture, the business felt it needed the greater reach that an agency could provide. However, having both solutions were too costly for a growing startup, so it needed a solution that could combine these assets while still being cost-effective.

Play also needed to improve its recruitment processes, including developing job descriptions, pre-screening candidates, orchestrating candidate interviews and feedback, automating onboarding processes for better candidate experience and managing all of the applicants from job boards and its own website. Various areas of talent acquisition needed improvement as well, to make sure there were robust procedures to support the sustainable growth of the business.

Approach :

Play chose to partner with Troi because it could offer the best of both the internal recruiter, and the agency, worlds. Another reason Play chose Troi was because of the flexibility in the service which greatly suited its business needs, especially when going through hiring spikes.

Troi leveraged the power of having an internal network and a central database of candidates and sourcing tools, to bring in quality candidates in an efficient and timely manner, saving precious time and money for Play.

Through understanding the priority of roles, Troi has built a great pipeline of candidates for Play. In addition to successfully helping with hires, Troi has also improved the job descriptions, speeded up interviewing process in various ways, boosting Play’s employer brand, getting its Glassdoor page updated and improving the whole candidate experience, from start to finish.

Another great value Troi has added for Play is helping with future hiring plans and advising on different types of roles that would be advantageous for new projects and that benefit Play’s business growth.

“We’ve been working with Meighan for the last 3 months. In that time she has helped us secure permanent employees across tech, product, and operations. The pre-screened candidates were always of good quality, meaning we never felt we were wasting our time during an interview. Most of our candidates progressed to a second Interview. Meighan also handled the candidate rejection process too. Making sure candidates had a good experience, even if they were not successful. Overall the time spent by me (and the other hiring managers in the business) has reduced considerably, compared with our other recruitment agencies.”
Dan Atherton, CTO at Play