The Flutter UK&I partnership with Hirevue is leveraging AI-driven tech to maximise efficiency in high volume recruitment while improving inclusivity.

Flutter is a global leader in betting and gaming with a mission to make a lasting positive impact on the industry. They operate in 100 countries with over 23,000 employees, all of who share the same passion for bringing excitement and entertainment to life for millions of customers while leading the way in responsible play.

The Flutter UK & Ireland (UK&I) Graduate Program has a vision to hire the best early talent across the UK and Ireland. It aims to increase awareness of the employer brand, grow and retain future skills, and create a fantastic graduate experience.

Ambitious graduate hiring

Flutter UK&I wants to create future leaders and experts within the business, through a supportive and challenging learning environment.

They hire the best early talent and then allocate new hires to three streams within the business – technology, commercial or finance. They want to be able to compare themselves to leading brands that are known for their graduate programme.

Flutter UK&I looks for potential over technicalities. When hiring they assess both IQ and EQ. They want their graduates to be able to make commercially savvy decisions but also have the emotional intelligence to operate effectively as well.

They have hired people from a multitude of backgrounds and encourage diverse skill sets, including key technical skills within STEM and AI. These are critical skills that the business must grow to stay ahead of the curve.

Overcoming hiring challenges

Within the Flutter group are Paddy Power, Betfair, Sky Betting and Gaming, and Tombola. There is also Sportsbet in the Australian market and FanDuel in the US.

Attraction can be a challenge due to the perception of gambling and the fact that the Flutter brand is very new.

To overcome this, they went out to market with a full campaign under the new branding and did a lot of promotion on social media. This helped to drive 10,000 applications this year for 53 roles, 276% up from the previous year.

This meant that recruitment efficiency and communication were really important. Every candidate was sent through to HireVue for the initial screening, which has really helped with efficiency challenges for a very lean team.

That is where HireVue came into its own. As well as helping to improve inclusivity and using AI to reduce hiring bias, HireVue improved collaboration by enabling recruiters to work more closely with hiring managers. They both used the HireVue platform to review candidates and have a well-informed conversation.

Flutter UK&I uses HireVue’s AI-scored Video Interviewing and Game-Based Assessment solutions.

During implementation, Flutter and HireVue worked together on job analysis and focus groups to map the key skills and competencies required for roles.

They then built the assessment to measure them.

Candidates are able to take these assessments, which are short and engaging, but crucially provide data points and insights into the future potential of the candidates. From this, Flutter UK&I can effectively tier candidates ready for human review. It’s this combination and technology plus humans that leads to optimal hiring outcomes.

Laoise Dennehy, Early Careers Lead at Flutter UK&I explained:

“If I’m being completely honest, we don’t look at CVs when we’re doing our initial shortlisting, because I do think there is bias there, but we do ensure candidates meet requirements such as eligibility to work within the company for the duration of the programme. But I’m also very mindful that I don’t think your degree or certain results determine how far you’re going to go in your career.

“We send everybody through to HireVue and that does a lot of that work for us. The AI in HireVue’s video interviewing solution is amazing, but we always look at each of the tiers that it puts candidates into and on occasions put candidates through from lower tiers. It’s really important to augment technology with human judgment. We take the time to do that and it ensures we arrive at the best and fairest decisions. Generally, tiering by AI is 100% accurate though.”

A Group-wide partnership

Flutter UK&I initially started working with HireVue for their high-volume roles. They were a very lean team with a mountainous number of roles, meaning recruiters had less time to spend with candidates and on the experience they wanted to create.

If they had to pass the baton to hiring managers, they didn’t have enough time to educate them properly about hiring best practices, so there was also an opportunity for bias to creep in.

Once HireVue came into the business and quickly delivered value, it spread into other departments. It was soon used in customer service and then in trading. It’s also now used at corporate level and is being considered for tech roles.

Laoise added, “From a partnership perspective, it’s great that we haven’t lost our pace of work with the HireVue team. Often, when you work with a company for the first time, there’s drive there, but that fades away. But that drive is still there, which is amazing. They’re just so attentive. I’ll email them and they will be straight back helping with absolutely anything. There is always an instant solution, and often against very tight deadlines. It’s always easy with HireVue, which is really nice, and the people are so lovely. I love working with HireVue.

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