Mercy Ships Streamlines HR Processes and Volunteer Applicant Experiences with OutSystems

Challenge

Double Volunteer Recruitment Without Doubling the Trouble

Mercy Ships is a faith-based international development organization that deploys hospital ships to some of the world’s poorest countries, delivering vital, free healthcare to people in desperate need.

Founded in 1978, Mercy Ships has worked in more than 56 countries, providing services valued at more than £1.2 billion over the past 40+ years. In recent years the charity has had one hospital ship in service called Africa Mercy.

But early in 2021, Mercy Ships will launch the world's first purpose-built civilian hospital ship, "Global Mercy", more than doubling the charity's surgical and training capacity. Recruitment—which was already a global year-round effort—needed to scale to 3,500 volunteers annually. The charity will need to process over 7,000 applications annually to crew both ships fully.

"Every year, Mercy Ships draws volunteers from more than 40 countries, including medical professionals, mariners, teachers, and other professionals," explains Heather Peterson, senior director of talent acquisition at Mercy Ships. "Each role requires a unique skill set, and our exhaustive selection process was time-consuming for our staff as well as candidates."

In 2013, Mercy Ships had replaced its paper-based application process with a volunteer portal built with OutSystems. That project took just six months, and by simplifying the application process, the portal helped decrease time-to-hire by 20%.

But with recruitment set to more than double, Heather and her team needed to streamline the end-to-end application and selection process to be much faster but no less thorough.

"Because we were already familiar with OutSystems, we were confident we could make that happen on time and budget while enhancing the volunteer application experience even further," explains Heather.

Solution

Dynamic Application Forms and Candidate Selection Workflows

A project team of eight—four from HR, and four from Information Services— started work in October 2019. They had two main objectives; improve the application experience for candidates and streamline the review and selection process for recruiters.

Firstly, the team replaced the generic application form with one that dynamically adjusts for the applicant's role. This improves the applicant experience and ensures all role-specific information—such as evidence of qualifications—are submitted before the application goes to the recruitment team.

Secondly, the team developed an application review system with workflow support for the multi-stakeholder candidate selection process. "In the past, candidate selection involved a lot of back and forth emails between colleagues," explains Heather. "We needed a database and workflow capability, integrated with our HR system, that would eliminate unstructured emails and file attachments."

The project team delivered an integrated end-to-end recruitment solution that went live in April 2020. "The backend was easier to build than the original volunteer portal because we could reuse much of the previous development," explains Heather.