Pret a Manger Recruits Online - 09/2000

Since 1986, Pret a Manger has made a huge business out of the sandwich industry. In central London, almost every street holds the familiar Pret star above one of its shops or a billboard advertising an opening.

Part of Pret a Mangerís success has been due to the fact that although it has expanded rapidly, it has never moved away from its original belief that hard working people make the difference. While traditional methods of recruitment are proving to be successful and the candidates selected have always been of the highest calibre, with lots of enthusiasm sifting through countless CVs to create a short list can be a time-consuming and costly exercise.

Offering fast and effective service, online recruitment was an appealing solution and we were keen to explore what may be on offer. Although most online recruitment companies offer you the facility to plough through their database of candidates, this did not solve our immediate recruitment requirements. PeopleBank however did provide us with the answer.

We decided early on that the most appropriate service available to us was PeopleBank Select. The PeopleBank technology is harnessed on to our own website, effectively enabling us to have our own recruitment website and giving us control over the way we view potential candidates. We have the facility to quickly sort and sift through CVs to establish suitability, and also have access to PeopleBankís own database of candidates to search for possible employees. As well as the technology to publish vacancies on our own website, we are also able to publish branded vacancy adverts across the Internet through PeopleBank and their media partners, which include the Daily Mail, Carlton Communications, EMAP and United News. This service provides us with a much larger media reach than would normally have been available to us. Adverts can be updated or changed as regularly as we like and should we wish to analyse the response to an advert, we now have the technology to do so in seconds.

By using this method of recruitment, we have speeded up our recruitment process, can still recruit hardworking and enthusiastic candidates, whilst saving time and money. We also have complete control over the recruitment process and the look of our recruitment website. For Pret, going online, as a complement to the more traditional routes was the right choice, and I am sure many other companies will find they will eventually take the same path.