The Situation
Mars Netherlands is part of the Mars Inc. corporation. Mars Inc. is a family owned business and one of the largest privately held companies operating today. The company manufactures some of the world’s best known chocolate products, as well as an extensive range of pet foods, sugar and food brands.

The Challenge
The company places great emphasis on finding individuals who have the potential to grow and develop within Mars over the long term and its fundamental approach is to seek people who have what it takes to fulfil a successful career within the company. It recently took the decision to develop a new recruitment process to make it more streamlined, time-efficient and standardised across different roles and levels.

The Solution
Cubiks was selected to work alongside the Mars project team to develop a new Assessment Centre and implement a range of profiling tools and techniques that would reveal as much meaningful information about each candidate as possible. Cubiks, therefore, set about designing assessment materials and exercises that would ask candidates to demonstrate critical competencies within situations that mirrored working life in the company, and which reflected the five principles of Mars: Quality, Responsibility, Mutuality, Efficiency and Freedom.

The Results
The results from an initial study of the new Mars recruitment process have revealed a number of improvements and business benefits. The enhanced process is not only enabling Mars to select better quality candidates, it also appears that the selected candidates are better able to integrate themselves within the company and cope with a steep learning curve when appointed.