Financial Ombudsman

Collaborating to optimise the Financial Ombudsman's candidate attraction activity

Set up by Parliament in 2001, the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) is an award-winning service that helps resolve a wide range of disputes between financial businesses and their customers.

In the wake of COVID-19, organisations had to adapt quickly and think differently. Looking to evolve and optimise its recruitment process and overcome the challenges of hiring new talent during the pandemic, the FOS partnered with Lifetime to introduce a strategy that could attract, identify and onboard high-quality recruits for Business Administration Level 3 and Customer Service – and do it all in a virtual world.

How Lifetime attracted and screened over 1,000 applicants to uncover the best talent

Within a challenging timescale of just three months, Lifetime supported the FOS with our best practice for online recruitment. It meant temporarily adapting their internal processes to pivot from a face-to-face, workshop-based approach to an entirely digital onboarding solution.

Lifetime’s experienced AR service worked in partnership with the FOS to onboard apprentices at speed. In two weeks, 1,000 applications were successfully generated through the campaign, followed by a unique four-day screening process to include diversity, eligibility, suitability and competency metrics.

Line Managers were engaged effectively to shift perceptions and drive the campaign's success, while each candidate was prepared for virtual assessments and interviews (resulting in 97% attendance at assessment days and interviews).

Through its partnership with Lifetime, the organisation was quickly armed with a flexible and effective digital recruitment strategy that brought fresh talent into the organisation. Despite the challenges presented by the pandemic, the FOS successfully met its ambitious timeframes, recruiting and enrolling 25 high calibre
apprentices at the start of 2021.