JGP News

Councils are increasingly turning to technology in areas such as social care to recruit scarce professional resource.

With the current pressures of baby boomers nearing retirement, the pool of social care talent is become ever smaller.

The pressure, meanwhile, to transform services and deliver Gershon efficiencies is unabated and local authority adult social care and children’s services must use every tool at their disposal to reduce unnecessary costs, recruit and nurture skilled staff and free up precious time for doing what really matters: delivering services to the people in their care.

Technology is a tool, one that helps people to look after other people – to do their job, to deliver and manage services, and find the right people to look after those in their care.

Zero social worker vacancies with Walsall’s Talent Pool

Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council has filled 44 social worker posts within the last two years using a Talent Pool solution from JGP. This planned and highly targeted internet based approach now delivers a reduced cost-per-hire of only £316-00 (media cost only) and operational efficiencies – effectively delivering both hire requirements and Gershon efficiency targets.

Like many councils around the country, Walsall has struggled for years to attract candidates to fill its social care and children’s services vacancies, but the authority’s Strategic Recruitment Team is now attracting the best talent using dynamic, online recruitment channels, designed and delivered by JGP talent management specialists.

It is important that strategic talent management complement existing HR to provide a transformational tool. Built on automated processes and the latest web technology, Talent Pools can deliver the sort of departmental process improvements that deliver organisation wide, system-based cost efficiencies. The administrative cycle of recruiting social workers and the accompanying burden of CRB and GSCC checks, for example, mean that the recruitment timeline is significantly extended.

According to Cordell Lane, recruitment consultant at Walsall, recruiting using the microsite works well, it “automates the application and combs out candidates who aren’t appropriately qualified. We can respond so much faster now, so job seekers don’t lose interest. We can continue to communicate with them in case other jobs come up. It’s a managed process and we know we’re getting better candidates with reduced expenditure per recruit.”

Harnessing the latest technology and social media is key to delivering effectiveness and efficiency in recruitment and staff development processes. Says Lane, “The scramble to get the best candidates isn’t going to go away, but we know we have a very well targeted and cost-effective formula that we can now build on.”

Bury builds Children’s Services team with Skills Portal

Initially used to evaluate and develop new inductees to the Children’s Services team within Bury Metropolitan Borough Council, the council’s new online Skills Portal was developed in-house by the council’s organisation development department with help from JGP.

It has since been rolled out to other departments to replace time-consuming, paper-based skills audit procedures and appraisal systems.

According to Bury’s organisational development principal officer, Kathryn de Wet, “The Skills Portal approach is helping us to break down the barriers and empowering staff to take more control of their career development. “It also aligns with our other drivers for competency, including corporate workforce development, health and safety planning and our investors in people programme.”

Staff fill out an online questionnaire that thoroughly assesses and identifies a range of competencies, with forms then ’signed off’ electronically by the review manager.

At the corporate level the data helps Bury to build a skills matrix of both employees and the organisation, enabling skills gaps to be identified and targeted action taken to fill them via appropriate training.

At the employee level, Bury can now plan and implement appropriate training sessions – controlling individuals’ entry level into employee and management training programmes. For example one employee may require an intensive two week training course, whilst another may only require a half day top up for that skill. In the words of de Wet, Bury can now “tailor training on an employee by employee basis”.

This deeper understanding of skills gaps also allows Bury to cut down on the time employees spend out of the office on training courses. Appropriate, quality, training is replacing quantity. Says de Wet, “We have built a framework of competencies which all our managers can sign up to. Future development phases link in more specialist areas of their professional development. In the Children’s Services project example, we have been able to highlight some important issues, particularly management of health and safety and management of diversity/ equality, very effectively.”

About JGP

JGP delivers online candidate management and recruitment solutions to over 1,000 customers in the public and not for profit sectors, helping organisations to reduce recruitment costs and time to hire by as much as 80 percent.

Skills Portal - in action at Bury MBC
Talent Pool - in action at Walsall MBC
Recruitment Management Solution - serves Newham Council with 96 percent of all its job applications and 85 percent of actual hires.
Jobsgopublic.com Network - Attracts over 1.1 million job seekers each month.