The global Talent Acquisition Team at Kindred Group consists of 20 employees located in seven countries. The team’s key objective is to support Kindred’s strategy by delivering against our growth plans. The recruitment process is values lead, meaning that Kindred’s core values, culture and employer value propositions are embedded in the candidate journey and hiring decision. With Kindred's new careers site going live recently we thought we would get some insight from Antony Moulds, Kindred’s Talent Acquisition Director, who is based in Gibraltar.
Hi Antony, it would be great to hear what made you join Kindred?
I joined Kindred, then Unibet, back in 2014. What initially drew me to the company was how open the culture was from my first interaction. My journey started out with a colleague base of around 650 people and only four members in the Talent Acquisition team. Fast forward to today and I have now over 2,500 colleagues! I have been part of the company's transformation from Unibet to Unibet Group and to what we are today - Kindred Group. This alongside with multiple business acquisitions. Two of the acquisitions and an expansion of our ever-growing global footprint enabled me to relocate to Gibraltar from our Wimbledon office. The Kindred Spirit that was there when I first joined, has been constant during our growth as an organisation and the changes we have been through.
What does the global recruitment market look like, and how does Kindred respond to it?
The recruitment market has been on an interesting journey, during Covid and post Covid. What we saw as a challenging start to the year in 2022 with a candidate driven market (less candidates than jobs) soon turned upside down with a lot of candidates and very few companies hiring towards the end of the year into 2023.
We had an all-time high number of new employees join our purpose in 2022. If I had to call out one reason for our success, outside of the brilliant Talent Acquisition Partners we have, it would be our focus on diversifying our talent pools. Showcasing our diverse culture across our employer branding, ensuring our job adverts and processes are inclusive and being able to monitor the data so we can constantly iterate, are just a few of our focus areas.
What are Kindred’s biggest selling points towards the talent market?
It's likely to be a combination of different things, for example the diversity of our workforce, our approach to hybrid working, our award winning all employee share scheme and values led hiring processes – they all form part of the Kindred proposition. What we have created at Kindred is a culture that makes employees want to build their careers here. Often people who do leave want to come back at some point in the future. We track many different data points, but one that is really telling is the number of hires we get as referred by our colleagues (on average about 30% of external hires). It is a testament to our culture that our employees want their friends and networks to join us on our journey.
We operate in the gambling industry, and there are many kinds of perceptions associated with it. The work we do around responsible gambling together with our journey towards zero ambition allows us to position ourselves in a way that unlocks talent from candidates who may not have previously considered our industry as an option.
What type of talent is Kindred looking for? In which areas are we hiring the most and is gambling industry experience required when applying?
The beauty of working for a global company that is sitting in the digital entertainment and tech space is that we have a variety of career options available across multiple locations. Two areas that are worth sharing here are in Customer Service and Sportsbook, they showcase the range of talent we look for. The requirement for specific language speaking Customer Service Agents is ongoing. These openings are mainly due to internal career progressions from our Customer Service teams and we often consider entry level candidates for these roles. We are also building our own sportsbook platform and with this type of project comes a broad range of opportunities across our tech and product functions.
For some roles previous industry experience is needed but with our values led recruitment process we can bring talent into Kindred based on their passion and drive to learn and grow.
How much internal career movement takes place at Kindred?
A key employee proposition for Kindred is “Grow with us”. We have various programs led by our Talent Development team that enable employees to learn and ultimately have a purposeful career with Kindred. On average around 30% of our hires yearly are internal moves. When we talk about internal moves, we encourage employees to develop through the management route but also cross functionally. Not everyone wants to be a manager and we recognise this. We have career paths in place to support every employee in their development journey.
What makes the future at Kindred exciting?
We are constantly looking at ways to innovate and drive the Kindred Group forward. Two projects stand out – the development of our own Kindred Sportsbook, that I mentioned previously, and will be delivered through our highly talented tech and product teams and secondly, the Tech hub that we are looking to open in India. From a recruitment perspective its these types of projects that enable me to see the value that the Talent Acquisition team are bringing to Kindred. This is exactly what excites me personally for the future.
