How Brent filled key new HR roles in just three weeks

Service area restructures can be an exciting prospect for Council workforces. They can alleviate pressure on staff workloads, revitalise teams, and create new pathways for employee progression.

However, they also raise interesting recruitment challenges. How do you find qualified candidates to take on new roles when staff need to hit the ground running ASAP?

Brent Council asked this exact question in the Spring of 2024.

A brand-new investment in Brent’s workforce created a range of new HR and Organisational Development (OD) posts that needed filling quickly. However, traditional job board advertising can take significant time to attract a large volume of quality candidates to multiple roles.

Following a successful collaboration with Jobs Go Public in Adult Social Care recruitment, Brent Council came to us with this new challenge.

Read on to find out how we worked with Brent to attract staff to nine new job occupations with just three weeks to spare…

Brent's hiring and transformation ambitions

Brent is a London borough which boasts a vibrant and diverse community. The Council’s staff show an overwhelming commitment to organisational success and frequently emphasise the organisation’s culture of support and collaboration.

Over the next few years, the Council is pursuing an ambitious transformation programme to deliver more resident-focused services. The HR team is central to this effort, being the key driver of cultural change across the Council.

Recognising this need, Brent have invested heavily in their HR team and undertook a restructure which created over nine new job roles.

The key challenges

With the creation of new roles came two key challenges for the HR and OD team to solve:

• Key roles such as Recruitment & Resourcing Managers needed filling quickly to provide support to hiring managers undertaking recruitment in other service areas.
• New staff needed to be sufficiently qualified and possess the right soft skills to hit the ground running and champion Brent’s new change programme with confidence.

As a result, our performance marketing team needed to create a bespoke attraction solution to allow Brent to find the right candidates within 3-4 weeks.

Jobs Go Public's recruitment solution

Given the time limitation and desired candidate profiles, we designed a burst campaign targeting both active and passive jobseekers in HR and OD.

We provided a combination of performance marketing channels with a soft search resourcing solution. This package allowed us to raise Brent’s employer brand profile, target highly relevant active jobseekers in the market, and reach out to experienced passive candidates in our HR network.

The communications mix for Brent’s campaign included advertising across the LinkedIn network with messaging tailored to HR and OD professionals, alongside programmatic ads leveraging the power of AI.

Our expert resourcing team also reached out to passive jobseekers in our network and provided support to the hiring team by keeping talent engaged.

In addition, we provided the following services to help boost Brent’s employer brand, optimise the candidate experience, and help the Council stand out from neighbouring organisations competing for talent:

• Job advert copy:

  Our copywriting experts met with Brent to gather information about the organisation culture, benefits package, job description and person specification. We took this information and transformed it into engaging adverts encouraging candidates to apply for the roles.

• Careers site:

  We provided the HR & OD team with a campaign career site promoting their employer brand, complete with bespoke copy and staff testimonials.

• Frictionless application environment:

  Our research with public sector jobseekers suggests that just under two thirds of candidates will abandon complicated application forms. To keep the best talent engaged, we worked with Brent to design a streamlined application form that prioritised the candidate experience.

The campaign results

The recruitment campaign for Brent Council delivered outstanding results in a short time. Within just three weeks, we drove significant interest and applications for the newly created HR and OD roles.

On average, each vacancy received 49 applications, resulting in a total of 446 applications across all nine posts.

Of these, 263 applications (59%) were driven directly by our targeted performance marketing efforts, with the majority coming from LinkedIn Ads—a testament to the power of precisely targeted digital advertising.

The level of response reflected not only the attractiveness of the roles but also the effectiveness of our bespoke recruitment strategy.

Overall, these results demonstrate the success of our campaign mix in delivering high-quality candidates within a tight timeline, ensuring Brent Council could fill these crucial positions quickly and effectively.

Want to find out more about how we can facilitate a restructure in your organisation? Get in touch with our team here to have a chat!