Case study: Housing recruitment with Hackney Homes

Briefing

Hackney Homes came to Jobs Go Public with an exciting proposition. In a first-of-its-kind move for the organisation, they had devised a new training programme that provided young people with a step-up into careers within the public sector.

Rather than an internship or apprenticeship, the scheme offered successful candidates full positions within Hackney Homes. They would pay candidates accordingly and provide thorough on-the-job training.

With 19 vacancies available over two phases, Hackney Homes wanted to attract ambitious, creative and hard-working young people. After hearing about the highly successful partnership between Jobs Go Public and another Hackney Council department, Hackney Homes approached Jobs Go Public. They commissioned us to assist with the entire campaign, from attraction all the way through to appointment.

The objectives were to create a campaign which spoke directly to the target audience. This was particularly aimed at local jobseekers within Hackney, with the aim of giving back to the community. We placed a high priority on creating a smooth candidate journey, ensuring that retention levels were high throughout the process. The biggest challenge of all was the timing. Both phases required a tight timeframe, requiring large numbers of applications in a short amount of time.

Solution

We devised a multi-stage process.

Firstly, we started with a talent pool which allowed candidates to quickly register their interest and Hackney Homes to filter candidates for minimum criteria. We invited successful candidates to apply in full through Jobs Go Public’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Following this, we took those who met the more complex criteria through to an assessment centre and interviews.

Jobs Go Public also created a purpose-built career site to act as the face of the campaign, with the running theme and tagline ‘Your journey starts here’. The tagline represented candidates taking the first steps of their career journey with Hackney Homes.

The career site provided a flexible and modern central hub for the campaign rather than attempting to adapt Hackney’s main site.

With research showing that 92% of candidates in the target audience still used Google as their first port-of-call in a job search, Google advertising played a significant part in the attraction campaign. This ran alongside highly targeted social media advertising which utilised imagery from the career site to create a cohesive campaign.

On top of the digital attraction campaign, Jobs Go Public contacted a number of London universities in order to promote positions to recent local graduates. As a result, the scheme was advertised on a number of university job boards, social media and alumni recruitment pages.

Results

Considering the short time that both phases were live, we received significant volumes of applications. We quickly filtered these candidates and invited those meeting minimum criteria to apply through Jobs Go Public’s ATS.

• 1,500 Talent Pool applications
• 400 ATS applications
• 40 applicants invited to interview
• 19 hires

The campaign was a huge success and Hackney Homes were not only able to fill all of the original vacancies but also extra candidates were used to fill additional roles.

The achievements of the campaign were not only recognised by being shortlisted for ‘Recruitment Innovation’ at the 2015 In-House Recruitment Awards, but also being presented the award for ‘Recruitment Campaign of the Year’ at the 2016 PPMA awards.