Macmillan Cancer Support's HR Transformation: A Detailed Case Study

This case study delves into Macmillan Cancer Support's HR transformation project, highlighting its efforts to revamp the applicant experience and improve recruitment processes. The charity recognized the importance of a positive candidate experience, given that applicants are potential supporters. Key initiatives included bringing recruitment in-house, implementing a new applicant tracking system, and personalizing communication with candidates. The case study also examines Macmillan's employee branding strategies, recognition and reward programs, internship program components (real task assignments, pay, goal setting, housing, scholarships), and volunteer recruitment approaches. By focusing on these areas, Macmillan aimed to enhance its reputation, attract top talent, and foster a supportive work environment. Desklib offers a range of similar case studies and solved assignments for students.

Running Head: Macmillan Cancer Support 1
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Introduction
When coming up with an efficient management technique, controlling and being
aware of a company’s culture is vital in several ways. In most cases, the way clients look at a
company and its goods and services is reflected in how internal brand performs from
workstation standpoint to assist in retention, hiring and recruitment efforts. Macmillan
Cancer has been successful due to a number of reasons that are well stipulated below.
Employee branding
It is very important for companies to deeply comprehend that external brand
performs in the same way for both clients and stakeholders as employment brands work for
employees and candidates. It reflects the way people look at a company and how it feels
being employed in there. For Macmillan Cancer support to be successful as recently
witnessed, the following employment strategies might have been applied:
Determine objectives, metrics, and scope
Based on successful industries, managers play a crucial role in employer branding
without a clear direction. Employing such techniques can cost companies a lot in the long
term. Currently, Macmillan has taken a worthwhile process in this section by clearly
stipulating a range of its approach, defining how vigorous employer brand improves value
and employ metrics to determine Return on Investment (ROI)(Edwards 2009). The following
question was taken into consideration by Macmillan Cancer Support before providing
objectives and clearly defining the scope of its strategy:
• What amounts of resources are available for investment?
• Will the company target on the regional, national or global market?

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• How will the company determine its success?
• How its leadership is determined in employer branding?
Finally, the company established its timelines and provided its objectives
Incorporate a lifestyle technique in the management of individuals
Around the globe, life is continuously becoming busy for individuals. Employees are
now engaged in jobs for 24 hours a week throughout the year. The need to train team players
on how to help employees to use the time off and manage work profitably to engage their
families is currently very essential. Macmillan employs flexible work techniques to provide
successful task engagement and commitment to its employees. It has proved to be effective
took hence the success of the organization (Saini and Chaudhary 2014).
Customize the employment experience
Adding a customized experience is a vital tool, a working technique that is witnessed
in Macmillan in most of its brands. The company engaged with brands through social media
in several campaigns ranging from ‘World Environmental Day’, to ‘International Women’s
Day’ as it will perform in its workstation. The main agenda put in place in the company is
socializing the business by employing efficient and the right communication flow at all cost.
The company first began by plotting the experience of its employees by conducting a
calculation to identify crucial sectors to work on employee experience enhancement
(Sengupta, Bamel and Singh 2014).
Recognize and Reward Program
Macmillan realized that recognizing and rewarding its employees is important in
enhancing their performance. Several startups were incubated to provide shares to new

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employees to act as motivation for more awards in case the company became successful. This
technique works out and employees were recognized and appreciated through various awards
that they were presented. This tool was incorporated to become a culture for Macmillan
employees and many rewards including non-financial have been availed hence the success of
the organization.
The hiring process in Macmillan Cancer Support is an important event that has always
improved over the recent past. Being up to date on the performance of operational processes
is a vital section to maintain the process on track. Such activities might include referrals from
employees, social sharing and job posts. Lately, accurate results have been achieved in
Macmillan with the assistance of the recruiting program with modern analytics. The
following approaches have proved important in Macmillan Cancer Support:
Keeping Track on Applications Analyzed Each Day
A follow up on the number of applications analyzed each day determine recruitment
processes. Macmillan applies an efficient technique to scan every incoming patch and
conclude by transforming respective applications in its hiring pipeline. A specialized team
quickly revises every application before forwarding them rapidly to its desired destination
(Swider, Zimmerman and Barrick 2015).
Number of Views
The right people should always be updated on the vacant positions available in an
organization. Well, advanced companies should receive sufficient traffic in their job pages
and specifically the vital roles that are in high demand at a particular period of time. To
achieve all these aspects, Macmillan targets high job visibility unlike in the past when it was
reluctant to attract high traffic to its jobs. A cloud-based hiring technique has been employed
in the company such that its stats can be accessed from any location an any given time.

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Target metrics is first stipulated before an expert market and distributes to attain its maximum
views. The need for an applicant and position advertised are well defined before posting it to
popular job platforms and career websites pages. These pages are always made simple to
browse through and are even linked to other subpages to maximize its views (Laumer and
Eckhardt 2018).
Actions made to improve the Hiring Workflow
Effective and efficient hiring workflow processes should be employed at all time. For
instance, Macmillan provides checks and balance with simple steps to be followed. A track of
time is taken while processing each and every stage of its hiring approach. The time taken in
revising applications is always very short and reliable. The target of Macmillan is to maintain
its process at a brisk pace by using a recruiting software like the simplicant that defines the
location of the bottlenecks in order to make them reliable. In a situation where these
processes are slow and inefficient, the cloud-based collaborative approach is employed since
it enables several people to access the platform in any given location at any given time
(Johnson, Lukaszewski and Stone 2015).
Key components for an Internship Program
Internship programs are vital for both an individual and an organization. For
organizations, it educates them on the insight of the current knowledge provided to students
in colleges and universities as they work with young professionals. It gives them an
opportunity to interact with someone they may want to employ in future. At the same time,
students are given a chance to begin their professional careers with the necessary work
Experience. The internship program at Macmillan is very crucial since it has several key
components that include:

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Real tasks assignments
Interns are provided with actual task since it is the most vital component that ensures
the success of a program. They are given challenging assignments that relate to their
specifications. The assignments provided are those valuable and most notable in a company
and that completes the whole work period. Managers in Macmillan gives real task by
analyzing job description, clarifying the importance of actual tasks and interns regularly to
define how they perform their work (Lee, Chao and Chen 2015).
Pay Issue
The Department of Labor in Macmillan has the responsibility of paying it interns
unlike in the past when they used to work for free. The program formulated in the company
tries to motivate the intern for a better relationship even in future.
Set Goals
Internships are meant to act as a learning opportunity for interns but as they go about
delivering their duties, they are also held accountable like any other employee. Macmillan set
goals for their interns so that they can study some things as they go about their objectives.
Every move an intern makes in Macmillan, they are always held accountable so that they can
also deliver (Mendis and Arachchige 2015).
Housing and Relocation
Not all employers provide fully paid housing for interns, but Macmillan appreciates
its interns by offering them full housing expenses. In case that is hard to achieve, relocation is
provided for those working in job sites which is very motivational to interns. This situation
has attracted more interns since they know they will be well gathered for in Macmillan (Lee,
Chao and Chen 2015).

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Scholarships
Paired scholarships are provided in Macmillan as a form of recruitment for an
internship program. This technique is applicable in some specific skill hence attracting more
applications from interns compared to the past when it did not offer such programs.
Furthermore, this has increased the number of applicants with the required qualifications in
Macmillan (Verma et al. 2018).
Recruiting Volunteers
An organization should have a consistent approach when recruiting its volunteers. A
clear policy and procedure should be formed to manage and control the recruitment process.
For Macmillan, volunteers always have interests and are motivated to take up a role in the
company since its policies and practices are well documented. There are few ethical risks in
the company hence attracting a pool of applicants to be volunteers every year (Raven et al.
2015). For instance, Macmillan has manuals stipulating marketing techniques, the reasons
why individuals should volunteer and the benefits they will get from volunteering in the
company. Furthermore, community organizations are well updated on the reason why an
individual should or should not volunteer hence more volunteers. The company also
understands the advantages and disadvantages it will be exposed to in volunteering processes.
This led to the establishment of good strategies that make Macmillan attractive to volunteers
(Carvalho and Sampaio 2017).

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