Case Study: John Holland achieves 48% female graduate intake and halves time-to-hire with Weirdly

John Holland boosts grad diversity (and makes hiring managers deliriously happy)

John Holland, a major Australian engineering and construction firm, needed better graduate recruitment: their previous agency-driven programme was slow, produced low diversity and left hiring managers out of the loop. To fix this they engaged Weirdly and used Weirdly’s candidate assessment platform—built around two-stage quizzes (values then leadership), video and free-text submissions, and automated candidate communications—to reshape their grad intake.

Weirdly implemented the two-phase assessments, a dashboard that flagged women, internal and Indigenous candidates, private hiring links and ongoing candidate nurturing (including during COVID). The result: a 90% increase in applications (over 5,000), 77% completion of the second quiz, 48% female grads in engineering, 63 total hires, a cNPS of 9.1, and time-to-hire reduced by 50% to 90 days—while hiring managers reported much higher satisfaction with the quality of candidates.

John Holland

Steph Havard

Resourcing Advisor