About this project

The Challenge

The twelve Local Authorities and three Fire & Rescue Services in the North East identified an opportunity to attack the high & rising cost of advertising their vacancies in local & national press and third party job boards.

As opposed to developing individual e-recruitment systems, a business case was developed by the North East Purchasing Organisation (NEPO), on behalf of the partners, which described a system that all partners could utilise in line with their own online strategies. The system would enable all partners to post vacancies, hence providing a single destination for job seekers from the region & beyond.

The estimated cost savings also took into account efficiencies around the administration of the recruitment process which could be achieved with a single system to support the recruitment process across all partners.

The Solution

The specification of the system focussed on three key areas:

1. A robust, scaleable solution which acts as an e-recruitment platform for each partner, held within the larger system. The system would enable new partners to be added with ease, offering all available features & functionality to all partners.
2. A candidate focussed website which enables the job seeking audience to have a rich mix of recruitment related information, simple & effective job search, added features to help better manage applications and user-engagement using web 2.0 technologies.
3. A flexible administration system to enable all partners to tailor their information and application management in order to compliment their current online recruitment brand and activity.

Tribal’s solution proposed a system which met all these core needs, and in addition suggested innovative functionality to add value to the core. The ongoing marketing of the system was a critical factor in the proposal, with a heavy emphasis on promoting the new website to the online audience: this approach matched the business case aim of migrating candidates to the website, rather than reliance on the press.

The Outcome

All twelve partners welcomed the prospect of the North East Recruitment Portal, and all partners engaged with the system from launch. One of the key drivers to achieve this is the flexibility around how each partner is able to engage.

All organisations have their own images, logos, colour-schemes and information in the site, to support and enhance their other online offerings.

Tribal developed the Variable Application Form system which enables each organisation to create and manage any number of online application forms to support their jobs. The same principle has been applied to a system allowing the creation of different ‘Workflows’ where candidates can be routed through different recruitment processes, based on that particular recruitment cycle. Within two months of launching this brand new site, the marketing had taken full effect and, along with supporting activity by each partner organisation, the site was seeing 20,000 unique visits each month. More than half of the traffic was coming through the major search engines, confirming the ability of Tribal to deliver a digital attraction strategy, combined with more traditional activity.

In eight weeks from launch, the site was ranked in the top ten results on Google for 14 searches. Such has been the success of this activity that a further three months of online marketing has been committed to.

Within 16 weeks of launch, over 3500 candidates have registered with the site, with more than 550 receiving daily job updates by email.