Petit Bateau fills over 40 positions / month with a single recruiter & pre-recorded video interview

• Sector: Retail
• Locations: 400 shops (France & international)
• Employees: 3 000
• Talent Acquisition target : 45 positions / / month in shops (i.e. over 500 / year)

Challenge: attracting candidates who will stay with a reduced recruitment workforce

The Petit Bateau brand has been part of the Rocher Group since 1988. Particularly committed to the sustainability of its clothing and professional equality within its teams, this retail player has three major challenges in terms of recruitment:

1 - Overcoming the high volatility of employees who need to be successfully retained

The retail sector is experiencing a severe applicant shortage, and it's complicated to find good profiles that will stay long-term, especially for sales staff. Recruitment needs are therefore particularly high, especially during the sales period.

2 - Find really motivated candidates and don't waste time on the pre-qualification stage

The no-show rate for shop interviews is almost 50%. The time lost is considerable for shop managers, but also for the person in charge of pre-qualification. Better candidate pre-selection is therefore becoming essential in order to eliminate unmotivated candidates as quickly as possible.

3 - Organizing around a single person to deal with the volume of applications from all the shops in Europe

A lot of applications but few really relevant profiles... a headache for the company that needs to find serious candidates to make its shops work. The recruitment force is managed by a single person who has to provide pre-qualified profiles to the various shop managers in charge of the next recruitment steps.

Building a recruitment process tailored to Petit Bateau's situation

For Katarina Jeftic, HR retail project manager in France and Europe, it was necessary to find a new way of organizing the first recruitment steps in order to save time and improve performance.

Katarina's day-to-day life changed when she implemented the CleverConnect pre-recorded video interview (previously known as ‘Visiotalent’) in 2021.

👉 Find out more: A recruiter’s guide to pre-recorded video interviews

The ‘secret’ of this new organization can be summed up in one sentence from Katarina:

For me, the pre-recorded video interview tool is like a second person supporting me in application pre-qualification!

Implementation: the pre-recorded video interview as the first stage in the recruitment process

It all started with the objective of increasing processing capacity in response to a high volume of applications of unequal quality.

The decision was taken to remove the time-consuming stage of CV screening and instead use video interviews for most of the open positions. The tool thus became the first phase in the recruitment process.

The process is straightforward and already enables an initial selection to be made from among the candidates, so that only the most relevant and motivated profiles are selected:

1. Offer opened thanks to Petit Bateau's ATS
2. Reception of applications on the ATS
3. Direct interface between the ATS and CleverConnect's pre-recorded video interview tool
4. Send of an automatic and personalized invitation offering to conduct the pre-recorded video interview
5. Pre-qualification of candidates who have undergone the video interview: approximately 20% of all initial applications
6. Videos of selected candidates (around 7/10, i.e. 70%) sent to shop managers to validate profiles
7. Face-to-face interview directly between the shop manager and the selected candidates

The time saved is huge, but that's not all: there's more room for quality, yet invisible, applications, lost among all the unmotivated applicants. Candidates with high-quality soft skills can be missed out because of the lack of time spent studying each CV in detail. If they are really motivated, they go for the interview and the magic happens:

The system gives a chance to candidates who may not have the skills on their CV but who have potential. It's a great benefit for those who have little experience but want to gain more! For example, we really like a candidate who doesn't have a certificate but is able to talk about materials and fabrics.

What does a pre-recorded video interview with Petit Bateau look like?

Everything is designed so that there is a single invitation campaign per profession and per country, in order to be as relevant as possible in the relationship with the candidates.

Katarina constructs the pre-recorded video interview questions by combining two options offered by our tool:

1. written questions
2. video questions

This enables her to better qualify candidates across several aspects and to ensure that she identifies their various strengths.

Results: precious time saved for everyone involved in recruitment at Petit Bateau

The results are simply impressive!

1. Increased management capacity: 30% more applications handled thanks to the tool's efficiency
2. Huge time savings: 80% time saved (1 pre-qualification of 3 min with the pre-recorded video interview instead of 15 min)
3. Time to hire cut in half: 2 weeks to recruit compared with 4 weeks previously
4. Higher-quality applications: 70% of candidates who pass the video interview are selected for the face-to-face interview.
5. Less time and energy wasted by managers: 2/3 of candidates attend the physical interview compared with 1/2 before.
6. Successful adoption of the tool: 75% of Retail hires are recruited using pre-recorded video interviews

And what about taking control of the pre-recorded video interview platform?

Katarina is very happy with the tool and its options. She's also very happy with how it works.

I was up and running on the platform straight away. And the shop managers love the video format. It saves them time and helps them turn good candidates into employees more quickly. At the end of the day, they use the face-to-face interview to validate the profile rather than to discover it.

The pre-recorded video interview system serves the objectives of Petit Bateau and Katarina thanks to its functionalities, which can be adapted to specific needs and organisations. This tool has enabled Petit Bateau to effectively transform its recruitment process.

👉 Discover our pre-recorded video interview tool

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