London Borough of Lewisham
Leading the way in the recruitment revolution while making significant Gershon efficiency savings is paramount
E-recruitment – Just look at the figures
For the London Borough of Lewisham, one of the UK’s national efficiency champions, leading the way in the recruitment revolution while making significant Gershon efficiency savings is paramount, so it is not surprising that Lewisham was one of the first councils to work closely with JGP.
Lewisham’s Strategic HR Advisor, Tim Anderson said: “We started working in partnership with JGP in 1999. We had just outsourced our response handling, had begun centralising the recruitment service and had a dedicated systems post in the team, so we were receptive to working with JGP to develop different products to make our recruitment processes more efficient.
Over the last 6 years JGP have carried on developing new ideas, which have enabled us to continue to innovate and improve our services to customers. This progressive approach was vital for us when choosing a partner.
“Initially we put our jobs on www.jobsgopublic.com, enabling people to register their interest and receive e-mail alerts for specific jobs and apply online. A year later in 2000, JGP developed a job search capability for our website to capitalise on the growing number of visitors to lewisham.gov.uk.
An incredible success
“Then in 2003 we set up a specialist recruitment micro-site for social workers, successfully encouraging them to register their interest in working for Lewisham. However, when this was not matched by our success in recruiting them, JGP developed a new specialist Talent Pool for us linking experienced social workers with recruiting managers”.
The results have been significant with agency costs slashed by 30% and vacancy rates for adult services down to 5% and 12% for children’s services. Cost per hire is also down, a trend reflected across the council.
Now the average is £618, down from £1,702 in 2000 and is projected to be £425 in 2006. In 2005, the cost per hire for jobs advertised in Community Care was £14,500, the Guardian £4,022 and on-line £101. In 2005, one third of all appointments were on-line costing just 5.5% of overall advertising spend and advertising costs are down approximately 40% since 1999. On-line applications have increased from 28% in 2001 to 62% in 2005.
Fig 1. Cost per Hire: JGP cf. other primary media sources
Fig 2. Comparitive expenditure: JGP accounted for 46% of all hires for just 6% of budget
The council has also introduced a one media rule. Now for all but the hardest to fill roles, hiring managers can only use one traditional media as well as the internet.
Tim said: “We now use our limited press advertising more effectively, using adverts to drive traffic to the web. In many ads now we don’t include our phone number and this has had no effect on the quantity and quality of applications”
Other savings from 2000 to 2005 include £30,000 per year on printing and posting job packs, a 50% reduction in call centre costs to £12,000 plus one full time post worth £25,000. In the same period application to response rate had risen from 40% to 65%.
So with such obvious efficiencies, why don’t all councils embrace e-recruitment?
“Diversity”, said Tim “some local authorities think that by e-enabling your recruitment processes you are going to limit candidate diversity. This, in our experience, is nonsense. If anything, we are noticing an increase in the number of applications from minority groups by using JGP’s services.
“For example, from July to September 2005 out of all the people applying on-line 24% were white, 47% black, 31% others, 51% female and 3% disabled. Overall in 2005, 56% of disabled applicants, 65% of BME/others and 35% of white applicants saw the job on-line. As with cost per hire, I think the figures speak for themselves”.
Fig 3. Source of Ethnic applicants: JGP cf. other media sources
