About Wolseley
Wolseley is one of the UK’s leading merchants in plumbing, heating, cooling and infrastructure, helping the trade succeed for many decades. Since its origins in 1887, Wolseley has grown to over 5,000 employees across the U.K. and Ireland. Before partnering with Appcast, Wolseley were looking to enhance its advertising channels to support recruitment for key operational roles, including drivers, warehouse operatives, and local branch-based positions.
Challenges
When Wolseley looked to Appcast for help, they were facing a few familiar challenges:
- Recruiting at scale while juggling manual processes. Recruiters were individually managing job postings, manually posting and unposting roles.
- Coordinating efforts across various vendors — often resulting in inefficiencies and inconsistent results.
- Limited technical resources to navigate challenges with a newly implemented ATS, which disrupted their ability to track recruiting performance.
Solutions
Wolseley began their partnership with Appcast in August 2024, adopting a programmatic approach to streamline recruitment advertising. At first, there was some scepticism — recruiters were accustomed to more manual control and weren’t used to centralised vendor management. But once trust was established and early wins were demonstrated, momentum quickly picked up.
- A programmatic approach: To fill roles within all geographic locations within budget, Wolseley leveraged Appcast’s programmatic solution to intelligently distribute their jobs across a proprietary network of thousands of job and niche sites. “Always on,” algorithm-backed technology ensured that the right jobs were posted to the right sites at the right time, maximising qualified applicants.
- Single vendor, single dashboard: Centralising both the execution and measurement of recruiting efforts meant that Wolseley could more quickly understand what was working and what wasn’t. It also freed up time that was previously spent on those manual, siloed tasks that recruiters were burdened with.
- Hands-on, personalized service: Appcast’s implementation team worked closely with Wolseley to restore broken tracking during the ATS transition — avoiding what could have been a return to fully manual processes. This technical support proved critical, saving time and ensuring continuity in candidate flow.
“Our collaboration with Appcast has been a game-changer. Robin and the team took the time to understand our business needs and provided a solution that has significantly improved our candidate attraction model. Appcast’s data-driven approach has allowed us to maximize our budget and increase the quality of our hires. We look forward to continuing our work with Appcast.”
— Craig Robinson, Talent Acquisition Manager,
Wolseley Group
Results
Since going live in August 2024, Wolseley has seen a marked improvement in recruiting performance, and they’ve seen many other benefits from their partnership with Appcast:
- Time Saved: Recruiters are no longer burdened with manual postings or managing multiple vendors.
- Improved Results: With programmatic in place, job ad performance is steadily improving month over month.
- Stronger Insights: Craig, a key stakeholder at Wolseley, relies heavily on Appcast’s reporting dashboard to monitor recruitment advertising performance. It’s become his go-to resource for identifying issues early and guiding strategy.
- Reliable Support: Whether it’s navigating campaign hurdles or advising on strategy, the Wolseley team has full support from Appcast.
Result Stats
- 65% increase in total applies in less than eight months
- 26% reduction in average cost-per-applicant
- 38% increase in qualified candidates
