After filling more than 100 high-pressure positions at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, BT’s director of people and policy says the lessons learned will be applied throughout the organisation. 

As official communications services partner of the Games, BT needed to hire 108 telecom venues managers for the 94 competition and non-competition venues, Caroline Waters told Recruiter.

“It’s a massively responsible, full-on position, requiring high energy and the ability to get it right first time,” she said.

After filling all 108 posts from 119 internal candidates, Waters said a key lesson was that “a simulated test is exactly the right thing to do when you know you have people who are going to be working in an unfamiliar environment, and where there is going to be a lot of problem solving”. 

Recruitment began in 2009, when 1,500 BT staff were invited to apply, based on their skills and experience. Given the skills base within BT, Waters said recruiting internally rather than externally was “a natural thing” to do.

After whittling down the numbers to 119 through “normal competency-based selection methods”, she added: “We were pretty sure we had the right people based on skills and characteristics.”

However, Waters said the company realised that the key requirement was to find people who could deal with the unique environment of an Olympic Games. “The rest of the process was finding practical ways to see how they coped under pressure,” she said.

The next stage involved taking candidates to a place a bit like the Olympic park “almost a military camp” for two or three days, said Waters, somewhere that was “completely outside their normal environment”.

Here the candidates undertook a number of simulated tests to assess their decision-making, communication and leadership skills under pressure. 

One task was to talk for two minutes about a random sport, another to explain commonly used telecoms industry terminology, such as WAN (wide area network) and ethernet (an industry standard for connecting computers).

Following the success of this exercise, Waters told Recruiter: “BT is taking this forward to new areas particularly in the operational field, with areas such as security operations and system design identified to follow.

“We believe the methodology works at all levels of appointment and will continue to experiment and roll the learning out across the organisation.”

One of those appointed was Adam Brown, BT telecoms manager at Horse Guards Parade and the Mall for the beach volleyball, who joined BT on a three-year apprenticeship scheme in 2005.