Admiral Group

Insurance giant Admiral group’s 40-strong Talent Team places an impressive 2,800 candidates per year across its business from their Cardiff HQ.  

Ben Moriarty, Admiral’s Talent Acquisition Manager, recognised there was a need to develop the team’s skills when the business was adapting to a new way of working.  

 

“We realised that, as a talent team, we’d been spoilt.” Ben commented “We’d relied heavily on our brand as that had worked really well for us in the past. We’d never had to work too hard to attract candidates.” 

The team identified skills gaps such as marketing roles effectively, building agile processes and developing strong onboarding. 

“All of our costs were through the roof” Ben continued, “cost of hire, advertising, agency costs – we realised we needed a significant change to improve things.” 

After a restructure in 2023, Admiral’s Talent team re-emerged with a new objective. 

“Essentially, the vision was to transform our talent team from performing more administrative tasks such as putting out job ads and setting up interviews, into a strategic, consultative function that could partner with the business and start to guide the way hiring is done here at Admiral.” 

In order to achieve this ambitious goal, the team needed to invest in development and training – this led to the start of Admiral’s relationship with The Talent Labs. 

The Talent Labs delivered bespoke, face-to-face training for Admiral’s Talent Acquisition team. The training sessions covered The Talent Acquisition Lifecycle, Candidate Experience as well as delivering a Job Advert Copywriting Workshop. 

As a business that prides itself on promoting from within, most of Admiral’s talent team are ‘home grown’ and have served the business for many years. 

For Admiral, The Talent Labs brought an external expert perspective that was crucial to their continued growth.

“One of the most valuable things about The Talent Labs is that they bring an external, expert perspective. We had perhaps become quite entrenched in the way we did things. Having a trusted expert bring in new ideas in a collaborative and positive way really inspired the team.”

Trust plays a huge role in bringing in an external provider to train your team.  

For Admiral, it was crucial that they found a provider the team would feel comfortable with.

“We’re a large business” says Ben, “but we don’t consider ourselves to be ‘corporate’ at all. We were looking for a provider with no ego, who could bring the human touch and really help the team to feel comfortable and open up to new learning – that’s what we found with The Talent Labs” 

Ben noticed that the team also felt huge benefits from the face-to-face, bespoke aspect of the training provided. “It’s not very often that we’re able to get the team together outside of their busy day jobs for a session like this, and it’s immensely valuable” 

“The Talent Labs really took the time and care to understand our business from a cultural and commercial perspective and tailored the training to us – we just felt like they ‘got us’, which really helped with collaboration and bringing out the best in the team.” 

Since their training with The Talent Labs, the changes that Admiral Group’s talent team made to their processes have started to show some solid results. 

“We’ve definitely seen an improvement in the diversity of candidates coming through, across both gender and ethnicity which is a big win for us” says Ben, “the tweaks we’re making are relatively small, but The Talent Labs has just opened our eyes to the things we were potentially missing.” 

“The Talent Labs delivered an enjoyable, energetic session with a human touch, where the team could collaborate and learn. We’ve already booked our next training days and we’re excited to continue our development journey as a team.”