Using intelligent automation to transform recruitment processes

Overview

Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust introduced a radical transformation programme of their recruitment processes, using robotic process automation (RPA) to improve effectiveness and efficiency, reduce time to hire and improve the onboarding experience of new staff. This has seen a significant impact on the recruitment of candidates by reducing the time to hire and fill vacancies faster.

Key benefits and outcomes

• As of April 2025, 24,177 hours of time saved (12.36 whole-time equivalent) equating to a £325,240 staff saving (non-cash releasing) as well as £105,000 cash releasing.
• Additional 48 automations live across other trust departments and 44 live automations on their contract with other organisations that they run HR services for.
• Improved KPIs:
  - Time to hire reduced from 12.70 to 9 (weeks) on average
  - Time to process pre-employment checks reduced from 30.7 to 15.2 (days) on average
• As of 1 April 2025, the trust position on the workforce validation engine (WoVEn) (this is a national data quality ranking programme) improved from position 191 to position 10.

What the organisation faced

In 2021, the trust’s recruitment processes were inefficient and ineffective, taking an average of 13 weeks to onboard candidates. In addition, they were receiving a growing number of complaints from candidates and managers about the recruitment process due to slowness, poor system usability and loss of candidates throughout the process. As a result, their KPI metrics were deteriorating due to volumes of work, and colleagues were demotivated with limited ability to be innovative or add value. 

Due to the large increase in volumes of recruitment becoming unmanageable within the existing financial envelope, the team decided they needed to look at things more imaginatively and looked to advances in technology to see if the additional work could be managed better, without the need for additional resource.

The director of people services attended an event held by automation anywhere around automating processes within the NHS and the seed was sown as to how the trust could start to do this. 

What the organisation did

To enhance the recruitment experience and free up time for patient care, the recruitment team partnered with IT to transform processes using robotic process automation (RPA). The initiative aimed to reduce repetitive admin tasks, shorten time to hire, and improve onboarding for new staff.

Key goals included:

• streamlining paperwork via a new system for the trust - DocuSign
• reducing reliance on the trac recruitment management system (TRAC)
• co-designing improvements with managers and candidates
• targeting a reduction in time to hire from 13 to 10 weeks.

The result was ‘Ravi’, the recruitment bot. Ravi automates a lot of the recruitment process from adding a draft vacancy onto their recruitment system TRAC ready for authorisation, advertising the vacancy on various sites, inviting candidates to interview, drafting and sending conditional offers, right through to sending contracts and welcome emails on the candidates first day.

The trust needed executive ‘buy in’ in order to purchase the software to run the automations, as well as investing in a robotic process automation team who could roll out automations across the organisation if the pilot was successful. 

The programme was not simply around automation, it was a full review of recruitment processes and meant changes to some manual processes as well as introducing automations. A main driver of the change was to improve the experience of managers and candidates throughout the recruitment process

The programme (across recruitment) took around a year to implement fully. It is currently being rolled out across the rest of the organisation, and as new processes are introduced, automation is always considered as a potential alternative to the manual process.

Results and benefits

As of April 2025, Ravi has released 24,177 hours of time back to the team – the equivalent of more than 12 full time posts and £325,000. As a result, the team has also been able to remove vacant posts, which has saved a further £105,000.

The impact on the recruitment of candidates has also been significant, with the original target of reducing the time to hire to ten weeks, reached and exceeded – it now takes on average nine weeks. Vacancies are now filled faster, reducing reliance on bank and agency use. This is having a direct impact on the safety and quality of care their patients receive.

The streamlining of paperwork and rebranding of all correspondence has made the recruitment process simpler and more appealing to candidates – the team regularly hear praise for the positive recruitment experience received. Some of the comments received include:

"I am very impressed with the trust so far. Very professional but also friendly!"

"Really impressed and feel very supported"

"Everything has been well organised, really impressed"

The processes that have been introduced means that there is no time delay for human intervention, they are set up to run automatically and regularly throughout the day. Some of these processes were introduced to speed up elements of recruitment for example, a bot sends out offer letters, checks the alert register and links job vacancies automatically to the Electronic Staff Record (ESR) rather than manually. 

Other processes were around improving the experience of candidates and recruiting managers for example, requesting information early in the process to prevent delays later and the bot is able to request IT accounts to be set up for new starters ready for their first day. 

There was also some importance on introducing bots that would improve the quality of the data being input into the trust ESR system for example, creating a new starter form with mandatory fields and drop-down links that were sent much earlier in the process. The trust is now in the final stages of testing of a new starter bot, which would enter all the information from a new starter form onto ESR.

Overcoming obstacles

There were challenges in this project. Some of challenges of note included:

• Getting to grips with the technology. It was new to the trust and required some significant training and development of a new team. A training package and competency framework was developed to support our colleagues to learn the new skillset needed and expertise has been developed over time.
• Due to some of the processes within recruitment changing, it meant asking for information from managers early on in the process, rather than at several points throughout the whole process. This resulted in quite a substantial form for managers to complete, which was initially met with some resistance. However, once managers could see the benefit e.g. IT accounts would be set up, candidates would be added onto Healthroster etc, they recognised it was saving them considerable time overall. This challenge was overcome by clear communication with managers showing them the benefits of the changes.
• Engaging with the recruitment team themselves – it was important to bring them along for the journey, fully engaging with them from the start, so they could see what the plan was. The aim of this was to help free-up resource on a very stretched team, the recruitment team were able to recognise the benefits for themselves. 

Takeaway tips

• To automate in ESR you must have virtual smartcards in place. There is a free solution that NHS Digital can provide.
• You need an executive or deputy to be your automation advocate to gain traction and buy-in across your organisation.
• Be realistic - this takes time, resources, investment, energy, drive and commitment to deliver.

Contact details

For more information about the work in this case study, contact Eve Lucas, head of HR projects, Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust.