Awards recognising outstanding contributions made by employers and employees working with the Local Employment Partnership (LEP) were handed out to Tesco, Mariott Hotels and Debenhams this week.
The inaugural awards ceremony acknowledged the hard work and success by partners involved in the LEPs, a Government-supported approach to help disadvantaged jobseekers back into work.
Tesco in Aston recruited nearly two-thirds of its workforce through its LEP, which won the Employer Award for Best Practice in Recruitment, along with Debenhams.
Nissan Motors’ Sunderland plant won the Best Practice in Partnership Working award, bringing in 249 employees and providing a bespoke pre-employment training programme, the Nissan Routeway, for extra skills training. Marriott was awarded the Best Practice in Career Progression prize.
Sign up to our weekly round-up of HR news and guidance
Receive the Personnel Today Direct e-newsletter every Wednesday
“A number of companies are telling me that their recruitment task has been significantly simplified and made less costly because of the success of the LEP, because now the Job Centre Plus is presenting to you well-equipped people for the vacancies they have available, sparing them a lot of time and trouble in traditional recruitment methods,” the employment minister Stephen Timms told Personnel Today. “We want more employers to sign up. New employers are signing up all the time.”
The Local Employment Partnership has a target of 250,000 jobseekers returned to work by 2010, and must average over 2,000 a week if it hopes to make that amount.
