About the campaign

Over the past three years, AstraZeneca has been on a journey to enhance the candidate experience from attraction to onboarding. This started with a discovery phase, where it surveyed thousands of internal and external candidates about their experience of the recruitment process. From this, it built a sentiment timeline across the candidate journey and was able to identify areas of strength and places to focus.

Its candidate experience (CX) strategy was built around four principles: Think Timing; Pass the Torch; People Matter; and Make Moments Matter. AstraZeneca hires more than 20,000 people a year, rejecting many thousands more candidates, and the model includes more than 20 CX champions across the business who are the ‘eyes and ears’ for candidate experience in their area. The champions share data insights and feedback with their teams and deliver global CX projects.

This means the company has been able to enhance its CX data over the past three years and deliver a high-quality experience despite high recruitment volumes. CX has now become BAU – business as usual.

Successful candidates rated their experience at 4.66 out of 5 (an improvement on 2019), while unsuccessful candidates have increased their score significantly. The overwhelming majority of new employees are happy with the pre-boarding site and their onboarding experience on day one, while hiring managers find the onboarding tools useful.