Marshmallow is a ‘techie’ insurance company - not a sweet shop! Currently, we provide car and van insurance but have plans to branch out into other insurance products in the not-too-distant future. We spoke with Niamh Ronson, People Operations Specialist and Aaron Walker, Head of Talent Acquisition at Marshmallow, to find out about the problems they’re solving, some top people and talent tips, and why they chose Zinc as their background checking provider.
What problems are you solving?
The idea for Marshmallow came to our founders when they were talking to a friend who’d recently moved to the UK. Their friend was trying to get car insurance, but kept getting hit by outrageously expensive quotes. Our founders realised that migrants were being charged way too much for their car insurance. So they set about solving this problem using technology.
Our mission has since evolved. Nowadays, we want to make sure as many people as possible can access affordable insurance products.
It starts by making sure you have a really strong hiring culture where every person in the business understands the value of great candidate experience. That means making sure we have talented Talent Acquisition folk who are passionate about delivering an amazing experience to candidates every time. It also means working with hiring teams through training and retros so that they appreciate the importance of candidate experience. Being a consumer-facing business means that candidates could easily be customers. A bad candidate experience can not only affect your employer brand but also impact you commercially. To help us track candidate experience and provide us with insights on how we can improve, we use a tool called Talenthub.io which gives us feedback on how we can make the experience better. It shows us what we are doing well, but more importantly where we can improve. It also benchmarks us against other tech companies.
Be comfortable with change and ambiguity! Scale-ups aren’t for the faint-hearted and the business direction can pivot suddenly so you’ll need to be adaptable. Learn to worry about what you can control and let go of the rest!
We're proud to have created a culture that encourages everyone to keep learning, growing, and innovating. Life in a high-growth scale-up environment is constantly changing - but we see that as a positive thing! Our Marshmallowers are regularly provided with exciting opportunities to learn new skills and to take on huge amounts of responsibility.
And, thanks to our ambitious mission, we attract incredibly talented and passionate people who are a pleasure to work with!
Prior to Zinc, background checking was a super manual process, and took up a lot of time that could have been spent on something more impactful instead. As Aaron mentioned, we’ve hired 150 people in the past 12 months, so there was a lot of background checking for us to do!
The biggest selling point for us was the seamless integration with Workable and being able to trigger background checks with one click.
We’ve been using Zinc for the last 6 months and have used it to complete background checks for just under 60 new hires!
The biggest saving for us has been our time, which we’ve been able to refocus on making sure we achieve our People Ops roadmap and make Marshmallow an amazing place to work!
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