OVO Energy

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When OVO Energy's People Team noticed disengagement with their screening provider, they knew it was time to start afresh. 

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With a sharp increase in hires on the horizon and a demanding program to overhaul their onboarding experience, their sights were set on a background checks company that could share their vision, match their passion and provide the agility needed to grow and learn. 

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The working relationship with Veremark started in 2022, and has grown into a partnership based on trust, effective communication, and collaboration.

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Challenges

When it comes to talent acquisition, a great onboarding experience is regarded as a nice-to-have - but often pushed to the back of a long line of priorities. 

But when the People Team carried out a review of their hiring process, they discovered this stage carried real bottom-line and organizational benefits - which they were missing out on due to an inconsistent and unreliable service partner. Jenny Davis, Continuous Improvement Team Leader, explains,

“The journey was a mix of manual and digital. It was clunky for both new hires and our staff. We could cope with this when the volume of new hires was stable and low. But as soon as we saw any spikes in volume, the team would struggle and it pushed new starter dates out simply as we weren’t able to complete those checks in time.

On top of this, the outdated process meant that the team was required to gather physical copies of documents. With their in-house requirement to align to Plan Zero, (OVO’s company mission to create zero-carbon homes), a re-think was needed. Davis says,

“We wanted to shift to a solution that aligned with our strategies and create efficiencies, so whether we had ten hires a month, or 200, the service level would be consistent across the new starter experience.”

Like most organizations, OVO Energy has a specific set of hiring challenges that need to be supported. Ash Tee, People Services Manager explains,

“We go through periods of intense hiring activity depending on which roles we're hiring for. For example, we have a high volume of hiring coming up this year for our customer-facing roles.”

Tee and her team also have a huge focus on their Belonging Pledges - especially the need to hire from communities that reflect the customers OVO serves. Hiring not only takes place in the UK, but also abroad, and securing diverse talent from overseas. 

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But prior to the partnership with Veremark, new hires were joining the business with incomplete checks, that had either been cancelled or timed out. The team wasn’t being kept up to date with candidate progress on the platform and then had to put in extra effort to resolve discrepancies along the way. “There was a lot of money wasted, and from a legal standpoint, not where we wanted to be”, Tee adds.

But OVO was not only planning to get better tech to improve rates. The team planned that whoever they chose would work with them to transform the entire experience of background checking. Neil Watson head of People Services and Operations of Continuous Improvement explains,

“The plan was to define the employment checks process and make it a moment that matters in the onboarding process… to make it such a seamless experience for candidates - something they'd talk about when they go and move on to other roles.”

OVO’s requirements were simple: to ensure full compliance, to start new hires with all the right checks in place, and improve turnaround times by making sure the experience was fully digital, and enjoyable.

With conversations with their provider stalling and candidates joining OVO with incomplete screening, the team decided to go to market and find a partner that matched their aspirations.

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Solutions

“The week we launched (with Veremark), some candidates' checks came through in four minutes. We were having a party behind the scenes as that was unheard of before!"

The team knew that in order to achieve their aims, they would need a partnership, rather than a provider-customer relationship. Jenny Davis, Continuous Improvement Team Leader explains,

“OVO is an innovative, fast-paced company, and we like to think of ourselves as quite entrepreneurial - more a tech company than an energy company. So we were looking for someone who would align with the mindset and the pace that we wanted to move at.”

“We weren’t looking for a third-party supplier. We were looking for a partner whom we could work with and collaborate with to make the whole experience better - not just the bit that we owned, but the platform and the service that Veremark offered as well.

The team started looking for a new provider in 2022. Months of meetings, phone calls, demos, and recommendations from other organizations followed.

“That’s how we met Veremark,” Watson adds, “We knew then that they could help us achieve our aims.

It was an instant match. “What Veremark did was understand what we wanted from an OVO perspective. Usually, when you're looking at this type of provider, it's just very much an off-the-shelf solution and you feel like you're one of many. However, with Veremark, we were able to have a conversation around our needs, and what we wanted to do going forward. It just felt a lot different from previous suppliers and providers. 

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Working with Veremark

“We’re now often contacted now by people saying ‘I’ve never had an experience like that." 

The Veremark team sat down with the People team at OVO and worked out exactly what needed to be done to meet the targets. A working team was set up with dedicated account managers who agreed to meet the People Team on a weekly basis, to catch up on work progress, new requests, and new challenges.

With those weekly meetings going from an hour long, down to fifteen minutes, it’s clear that the relationship between the two organizations is working. “The list of things we need to cover is now much shorter - which is a good sign!” adds Tee.

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But Tee and her team are much more than users of the Veremark platform. As the People team evolves, and new challenges and situations arise, they feed back, request additional details to the product and adjust existing features

“I love the fact that if we come up with an idea, we can say, ‘This would work for us because it would save us time, is that something you can do?’ And 99% of the time the answer is ‘Yes, let us take it away to the team and we'll do it’.  There has been a real commitment to taking our ideas on board, which I think has made us feel really valued.”

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The candidate experience

“The candidate experience now is the difference between night and day.”

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Alongside providing a global range of checks and creating an easy-to-use, integrated platform, Veremark’s key focus for all customers is to deliver an exceptional candidate experience. 

While this specific UX is often overlooked by other providers, the early interactions that a candidate has with a business count, laying a strong foundation for the working relationship and wider brand perception. Conversely, poor candidate experience can result in massive drop-offs in application conversion rates, talent pool opt-ins, and even the length of time an employee stays with the company. 

Ensuring a smooth journey for potential new hires is important to OVO too. Now, candidates can input everything they need to provide from their phones. Thanks to full integration with the department’s HR systems, and a fully digital screening system, OVO’s satisfaction rating is now 4.8 where previously it was hovering around 3.8. Watson remarks, 

“The candidate experience now is the difference between night and day. It’s so easy to do - a process that works for the candidate as they only have to provide information once. 

“The communication and engagement with both Veremark and OVO is one where it’s just adding and adding to improve the experience. When people start, they’re already excited about being at OVO - we haven’t lost any of that initial enthusiasm by a delayed or complicated onboarding process.

“We’re now often contacted now by people saying ‘I’ve never had an experience like that.’ 

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Benefits

“From a relationship perspective, it’s working. From an experience perspective, it’s working. From a time perspective, it’s working.”

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The strength of any partnership lies in the results. OVO’s People team stays focused on their HR metrics as a way of keeping on track. With the relationship with Veremark now well-established, what differences has the new platform made?

“Well firstly, we’re 100% compliant now.” Watson says, “Previously it was taking up to 30 days to get somebody through an employment check process. And even then it still wasn’t complete. I had 50% of our people starting without checks in place. 

“With Veremark, we’ve moved that completion time from 30 days to two weeks. And in those two weeks, we’re 100% compliant. Now nobody starts at OVO without the necessary checks in place.”

The old, semi-manual process using outmoded tech was a massive pain point for OVO. Since coming on board, Veremark has removed this heavy administrative burden from the busy department.

“Veremark is now doing a lot of the stuff that we were once having to do ourselves and has saved my team a lot of time. And because of the relationship and the communication between us, we’re getting immediate responses, whereas before we’d wait weeks and weeks. 

Tee agrees. “All along the way, there has never been any form of disconnect with the communication with Veremark. We’re always kept up to date with what’s going in - from automatic emails to prompts through to our account manager who we meet with every week. There is a lot of trust there, and they will let us know, on a daily basis, what’s going on. That then allows us to prioritize and plan our time better.

At the beginning of the partnership, OVO had a really intense period of hiring. February 2023 saw the business hire 315 people. As with all spikes in hiring, processes slow down but Veremark was able to provide the company with turnaround times - from applying for the check to completion - of 12 days.

Fast-forward to June 2023, 150 hires joined OVO and completion times fell to around three and a half days. Tee adds, “We’re now sitting at two and a half days for July. When you’re hiring for roles that need to come into the business quickly, that turnaround time has made such a difference - and made it so much easier for the people team here.”

This all feeds into the overall experience that OVO is creating: a tech-first, quick-moving business that holds itself up to the highest standards.

“The week we launched,” Davis says, “some candidates' checks came through in four minutes. We were having a party behind the scenes as that was unheard of before!”

Watson concludes, “From a relationship perspective, it’s working. From an experience perspective, it’s working. From a time perspective, it’s working.”

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