Nestlé Immersive Strength Assessment

As CAPP's creative partners CA3 have a great deal of experience developing and creating solutions that help attract and assess people on strengths. So, when they came to us with Nestlé and asked us how we would go about making their assessment test for graduates and interns more immersive, more true to life, we were ready.

CAPP spent months analysing and assessing the strengths high-performing graduates and managers at Nestlé had. This research allowed them to create a list of 16 key strengths - strengths you needed to succeed at Nestlé.

/Objectives

Nestlé had a number of key objectives that our solution had to meet. These were:

(1) Ensure that all candidates, no matter what social background, ethnic origin or gender, could be tested effectively and fairly against the strengths developed by CAPP.
(2) Ensure our solution is innovative, engaging and enhances the assessment process for all candidates.
(3) Ensure our solution is as real to life as possible, giving candidates real insight and perspective on what a career at Nestlé  will be like - and the challenges it will contain.
(4) Ensure that only the best candidates, with the strengths to succeed at Nestlé are selected for the final interview stage of assessment.

/Our solution

CA3 have a great deal of experience in making the assessment process more immersive and engaging. In fact, in another life (and another company) our directors won best innovation and work of the year at the RADs for their work with KPMG graduate assessment.

So, our first step was to sit down with CAPP and ensure we understood the Nestlé strengths AND how CAPP felt them best tested. After much discussion, a scenario based solution was decided upon and CA3 set about creating the first scenario for Nestlé to evaluate. While the acting is awful (see for yourself by clicking here), it gave Nestlé a great idea of how a scenario based assessment test would work.
We then evaluated the pros and cons of video vs computer generated characters, finally deciding on video. That's where the fun began.

CA3 created Kate. A real, but fake, Nestlé graduate. We invented her boss, her friends, her office and even her personality.

We then sat down with the CAPP psycologists to create 16 work-life scenarios that immersed applicants into the working world of Nestlé and the challenges they could face there. At the end of each scenario, candidates had to decide what they would do in each situation, by ranking five different answers in order of importance to them. Kate was also on hand to introduce the test, and help make it seem as real as possible.

/But there's more

Even before the assessment test went live in September, Nestlé wanted to reduce the amount of applications and increase the quality applicants. The dream of any graduate recruiter, we suggested a novel way of accomplishing it - by using strengths.

CA3 suggested introducing the Nestlé strengths earlier into the attraction process, helping graduates and interns self-select before the application process began, and here's how we did it.

Like many graduate recruiters, Nestlé visit hundreds of universities and exhibitions a year, so we created a strengths based stepping-stone game, almost like a giant snakes and ladders. Graduates stepped from one square to another, based on their answers to certain questions and where they ended up was entirely down to what strengths they had. In this way, they were able to experience all of the strengths you need to work at Nestlé.

To make the important jump from event to online, we also created one final test. One that helped candidates understand which graduate programme their strengths would be best suited for within Nestlé. Once they knew this, they could go on to apply knowing that they had the right strengths and were applying to the right programme. See which programme would suit you best by
clicking here.

/Results and effectiveness

Assessment and selection for this years graduate intake is still under way, but already Nestlé have reported great results. Applications are down by 18%, but the calibre of candidate has hugely improved. We're looking forward to being able to put more concrete stats here shortly.

The campus teams have raved about the strengths stepping stone game, as a great way to get students talking and interested in a career with Nestlé. And we can see that it's working well, by the amount of candidates trying out the online quiz.

Only candidates who have spoken to a member of the campus team are given access to the quiz, even so that stats are great.

The game has been played over 1,300 times to date, with an average time on site of just over one minute - which is more than enough to complete the whole quiz. What's even more interesting to view is which programmes were the most popular (baring in mind that candidates didn't know that their answers were deciding the final programme outcome).

The most 'popular' programme was Technical Leaders, followed by Supply Chain and Marketing. The least was Finance, though we've not told the Finance team yet!

The whole assessment was also nominated for the Advancement of Social Mobility award at the Target National Graduate Awards recently, and picked up a Recruiter award too.