Monzo and Tempo

Founded in 2015, Monzo has changed the banking industry. Putting transparency, access and customer experience first, they have managed to steal significant market share in a notoriously competitive industry.

Today, they have over a million-customer using their debit cards and managed to raise £20 million within 3 hours.

The app has gone through hundreds of iterations, and the company puts huge weight in customer feedback. By their own admission, they wouldn’t have been able to grow the rate they have without the volume of customer interaction.

“At Monzo, customer experience is fundamental to the business. We have built our reputation on providing a level of real-time customer service and insight that the established banks don’t offer. Undermining this would have far-reaching implications. We have to continue to deliver the most transparency and usable app, and to do that we need the best Customer Operations team,” said Hind Ali, Operation Support Analyst at Monzo. “We don’t just need bodies, we need personable people with the right problem-solving skills to provide the customer service we expect.”

In autumn of 2018, the number of customers getting in touch was sky-rocketing and Monzo needed to get employees on board fast to deal with issues. The company decided to expand the Customer Operations team by 60 full-time employees by December, a massive undertaking for a company just a few years old.

When starting out, to get as many applicants in as possible, they decided to use multiple hiring platforms – this soon ran into issues. Managing these different systems and accessing applications fairly and thoroughly, simply wasn’t possible. The candidate’s information would come through in different formats and was difficult to compare or analyse quickly.

Written applications were also proving an inefficient means of evaluating candidates. Monzo was looking for people with problem-solving skills and the flexibility to deal with varied situations and questions – skills which are very difficult to perceive on a CV. This meant they were wasting time by inviting unsuitable candidates.

“We were running at full capacity, holding two assessments each week and still struggling to keep up and get the right candidates in. We literally could not do it any more, there was no more time and it was causing the team to creak and a lot of worry,’ said Ali.

Process 

To help elevate this, Monzo decided to ditch other recruitment companies and only use Tempo and their own website for hiring. The Tempo platform uses technology to match vacancies with expertise, instantly creating a shortlist of the most suitable candidates for employers to view. Candidates upload videos, giving a brief introduction and can then be asked to answer in real-time which employers can view. Employers are also able to manage the entire recruitment process in the intuitive platform, entirely cutting out third party involvement.

“We realised that what we were doing just wasn’t working. Traditional recruitment companies were placing too great an emphasis on experience, leaving it until the assessment day to see soft skills in action. We really needed to assess these skills from the off,” said Ali. “There is just no emotion or personality in a CV – it is nigh on impossible to get an idea of someone’s soft skills by looking at a list of jobs they have done.”

“With Tempo not only could we see a 30-second video introduction from the candidate, but we could ask applicants to send real-time video answers to questions that we had posed. This meant we could see how they reacted to challenging situations, before inviting them to an assessment day,” she added.

Not only could Tempo improve the quality of candidates, but they simplified the whole recruitment operation into one simple to use platform. This meant time spent flicking through and getting up to speed with other platforms was completely eliminated. It also had the added benefit of meaning people could be onboarded in the recruitment team with minimal training.

Results

“Tempo has completely revolutionised how our recruitment process. Rather than hiring 60 people we set out to, we have been able to hire 200 – this would not be impossible without them,” said Ali.

“The main differences have been in two areas – efficiency and peace of mind. We now have a 50% success rate with Tempo. As anyone in the recruitment industry will confirm, that is unheard of. That level of efficiency would have been a pipe dream without Tempo,” added Ali.

“We are now able to immediately see which candidates are engaging and would fit our culture before assessment days take place. As a result, we’ve been able to scale them back and save the whole team a huge amount of time to spend on other projects. Considering the Customer Operation recruitment team is made up of 4 people working full time, that is a huge amount of time. This can be spent on hiring for other more technical roles or improving onboarding and internal processes.”

Other than efficiency, the Tempo platform also provided the recruitment team with great peace of mind. “The platform simply does the vast majority of the work. We just have to check in and watch the videos. If we had any questions Tempo’s team were always on hand to offer advice. Changing the parameters for candidates or turning it off for a short period of time, simply could not have been easier. Not only this, but video recruitment hiring meant that we were able to hire a truly diverse team. Putting soft skills first, meant that we had a huge varied team, making Monzo an even better place to work.”