Healthcare

Crafting a clearer and more consistent candidate journey for Grant Thornton

How Unseen reduced drop-out rates during the process and renege rates post-offer for Grant Thornton.

About the Customer

Background

Grant Thornton needed a way to make the transition into work clearer and more consistent for their early careers candidates, reducing drop-out rates during the process and renege rates post-offer. Using Unseen’s candidate experience and onboarding platform, Meet&Engage, they created a Welcome Hub, bringing practical pre-joining guidance, real employee stories, useful tasks, and live events together in one place, helping candidates feel supported before their first day.

Our solution

The Welcome Hub programme focused on the offer-to-start stage. Its aim was to give every new joiner useful information at the right time, build confidence about entering a professional environment, reduce avoidable uncertainty, and keep candidates warm and engaged for up to 10 months between offer and start date.

The content was organised into seven cohort packages:

Unseen created tailored content, with candidates receiving practical guidance on topics such as dress code, workplace skills, office information, and what to expect. Videos, welcome content, and real employee stories helped make content relatable.

Content was released gradually, rather than asking candidates to absorb everything at once. Date-based “To-do” posts set out tasks within specific windows, and candidates could tick off completed items. FAQs and a chatbot offered routes to answers outside of working hours. Candidates could receive notifications when new content or responses were available.

Virtual events added direct contact with teams and peers. ‘Ask us anything’ sessions ran in October, November, January, and February, with events totalling just under 300 attendees.

Outcome

The Welcome Hub achieved results, exceeding targets and resulting in a significantly improved candidate experience:

Grant Thornton also set a target for at least 75% of new joiners to feel more prepared for a professional environment. The target was met: 75% said they felt more prepared, and the remaining respondents said they felt somewhat prepared. No respondents said they felt unprepared.

Repeated feedback described the Hub as useful, clear, accessible and easy to navigate. Candidates valued practical advice, regular content releases, the to-do list, FAQs, virtual events, office information and videos. Real experiences from Grant Thornton people helped candidates relate to the transition and feel more confident about joining.

The Hub also reduced the administrative burden on the early careers team by answering common questions and supporting task completion. Sarah Blake, Grant Thornton’s front-line team manager, noted a noticeable reduction in new-starter enquiries to the inbox.

By combining timely guidance with authentic experiences and opportunities to ask questions, the Welcome Hub extended the employer brand beyond recruitment communications, showing candidates both what to do and what joining could feel like and ensuring they were ‘Keeping the Yes’, reducing reneges through creating a more connected, confident and consistent pre-joining experience.