Health Sector Talent was praised by the judges for its proactive, flexible and an innovative approach. Working with a health trust HST secured a record number of job applications, achieved fewer candidate withdrawals and a dramatic improvement in the average cost to hire. We look at their winning entry and those of our other finalists

WINNER

HealthSectorTalent

HealthSectorTalent is tackling the fact that social care is finding it hard to attract recruits because there are many higher-paid roles in the wider economy that are also perceived as less demanding. Working with a trust in Northern Ireland, HST’s objective was to attract more people into the occupation who otherwise would never have considered it.

It began by establishing a small project team, working across both functional and organisational boundaries including the trust’s HR team, and domiciliary care. Team leaders were appointed by each stakeholder. HST needed agile decision-making on key parts of the plan with regular team leader meetings scheduled to ensure that the project was progressing with key actions escalated and addressed in a timely way. Given the scale of the vacancies and the urgent need to accelerate recruitment, a series of open days were planned across the trust’s three sites with a focus on being a one-stop-shop. The project team leaders process mapped the candidate journey from application to appointment. HST planned for all scenarios such as walk-ins, a candidate that doesn’t pre-register and just turns up at the event.

The effective use of resources including the trust’s small HR team, stakeholders and HST, resulted in improved efficiency, enhanced creativity, increased motivation and better outcomes than had previously been achieved by the trust. Improved candidate engagement has resulted in record job applications being received for social care vacancies within the trust.

RUNNERS-UP

Omni Resource Management Solutions

Omni is a resourcing transformation specialist whose purpose is to change the way organisations resource for the better.

As a consultancy-led business, Omni’s goal is to constantly add value to customer relationships and develop resourcing strategies. At the start of any new partnership and annually thereafter, Omni conducts a Resourcing Effectiveness Assessment (REA) to benchmark the client’s recruitment strategy, activities and processes and develop a roadmap for continual improvement, providing solutions to help overcome the current challenges clients are facing. Working alongside dedicated teams of talent advisers who operate behind clients’ brands, is the consultancy team, consisting of experienced subject matter experts, who develop innovative strategies in partnership with clients. Recent strategies have included strategic workforce planning, market benchmarking and talent insights, inclusive attraction and selection, and utilisation of tech for onboarding and retention. It is a unique approach that Omni feels differentiates it from its competitors and provides clients with an industry-leading talent acquisition partnership.

One client was Ofcom. With expanding responsibilities through the Online Safety Bill, Ofcom appointed Omni to deliver a total talent service. The Safety Bill is a new set of laws developed to protect children and adults online and Ofcom, as the appointed regulator, needed to find experts, with extremely specific tech and compliance skills, to deliver against their new regulatory responsibilities. Some of the roles being created didn’t actually exist anywhere previously, and this presented a number of challenges for recruitment,  including skills identification and candidate engagement. An additional imperative for Ofcom was to achieve this growth, while delivering against its commitment to their equity, diversity and Inclusion objectives.
The solution saw Omni develop a resourcing strategy and change programme for Ofcom, and work collaboratively to help improve inclusivity across the recruitment process to access the best talent from the widest pool available. Omni developed partnerships with other diversity specialists to promote Ofcom as a best-in-class employer.

Resource Bank

Resource Bank is one of the UK’s leading recruitment process outsourcing businesses currently serving more than 40 clients, each one with its unique challenges and success stories. One of these clients is World Duty Free (WDF), for whom Resource Bank has provided an outsourced recruitment service for the past 16 years. In 2018 and 2019 Resource Bank recruited around 70-80 new team members each month, but the pandemic meant WDF shut down completely. Recovery was slow and having been shut for longer than many UK organisations, it suffered attrition.

To be back to full capacity for summer 2022 about 1,000 new colleagues were needed within four months. This was when the UK faced the most challenging recruitment conditions in years – and they all had to be security cleared. For WDF, Resource Bank used Avature’s enterprise recruiting and talent platform. This allowed it to fully customise recruitment workflows from vacancy approval through to onboarding and provide a user experience tailored for the candidate, manager and recruiter. Resource Bank created a bespoke careers website for WDF with an embedded Avature candidate portal in 2018 so it was quickly able to advertise vacancies there, on job boards and via social media – tracking all sources of applications.  In addition, everyone who had previously expressed an interest in working for WDF received personalised WDF branded emails and SMS telling them about the opportunities with quick links to apply. Resource Bank also used refer-a-friend and recruitment fairs to attract new candidates. More than 30,000 candidates applied as a result.

Saville Assessment

Saville Assessment’s early career clients want to use data in an efficient way to ensure that hiring decisions are based on valid, fair and objective data. Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and Saville Assessment have a long-established partnership in early careers recruitment, assessing apprentices, undergraduates and graduates. Most recently, JLR was looking to evolve its early careers assessment process in alignment with the evolution of  its brand to “reimagine the driving of tomorrow” and use selection data in an even more efficient way.

In order to respond quickly to business needs and secure talent, JLR needed an early career assessment process that could leverage enough data to handle large fluctuations in applicant numbers, accommodate the nuances of their various early careers pathways and provide a seamless and engaging candidate experience.

Saville Assessment devised an early career process that had a multi-assessment approach, with a completion time of less than an hour. The process consisted of Saville Assessment’s Match 6.5 behavioural questionnaire, Swift Aptitude tests and Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs) – all fully integrated into JLR’s choice of applicant tracking system.

With talent clearly still on the move, many organisations see internal mobility as an attractive way to retain talent and put potential where it’s most needed. Saville Assessment client Ricoh UK has undergone significant change and transformation, accelerated by the recent global pandemic. Their challenge was to tackle organisational transformation and talent retention through internal mobility within divisions.

Saville Assessment helped Ricoh UK introduce a career development programme, to identify those with leadership potential or those whose skills would be better suited to other areas of the business. Focusing on both role and the individual allowed recognition that the organisation wanted to encourage everyone to ‘bring their whole authentic selves to work’.

The new early-careers process at JLR was a resounding success and at Ricoh UK the robustness of the tool allowed for a wealth of data to be used in the selection process.

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