Jobsgopublic are delighted to announce that we have been presented with the Public Sector People Manager’s Association (PPMA) award for Best Volume Recruitment Campaign. This was in recognition for our work in partnership with Birmingham City Council for Hackney Homes in 2013/ 2014. The awards were held in Leeds on Thursday May 6th and the Jobsgopublic team was represented in force to celebrate the occasion.

In October 2013, Jobsgopublic were selected by Hackney Homes to run a complex recruitment campaign to fill a number of diverse and varied roles. Hackney Homes had undergone a significant reorganisation of their Tenancy and Leasehold Services division and as a result needed to urgently fill a large number of frontline posts; in total they needed 45 candidates across 21 posts.

This would be a challenging campaign as the vacancies were split across operational, technical and managerial roles, requiring attracting a large and diverse number of candidates, with varying levels of experience and qualifications. A recruitment campaign of this scale required a dynamic and unique approach.

Having developed a great understanding of Hackney Homes’ vision, values and culture, Jobsgopublic worked alongside our creative partner WDAD to devise an innovative ‘home improvement’ concept that would run throughout the campaign.

We formulated a complex strategy comprising of an array of online and offline attraction methods, including social media, Google and Bing advertising, targeted emails, online search, press advertising and advertisements on Jobsgopublic, LG Jobs, Jobs24 and Prospects. Jobsgopublic wanted to make sure the vacancies were seen by as many relevant candidates whilst spreading positive vision of Hackney Homes.

All attraction methods drove traffic to a dedicated microsite containing a wealth of information on the great reasons to work for Hackney Homes, including employee testimonials and benefits packages. The quality of applicant was enhanced by being better informed of what they could expect. Candidates were then invited to apply online using Jobsgopublic’s applicant tracking system (ATS).

The campaign was highly successful with the microsite receiving 35,122 visits in the 3 weeks that it was live resulting in a huge number of applications.

Working alongside Birmingham City Council, Jobsgopublic filtered and long listed the applications, inviting 560 highly suitable candidates to the next stage of the process. This consisted of online assessment by numerical and verbal reasoning tests. 220 candidates were then put forward for telephone interview and 160 candidates were assessed as being highly suitable for interview at assessment centre.

To deliver this number of high quality candidates following a challenging brief and a complex campaign was considered to be a huge success. This was all achieved at a significant saving to Hackney Homes, both financially with over 50% cost-per-hire reduction on previous campaigns, and resource-wise with hundreds of hours of management time saved.

Hackney Homes Division Head of Tenancy and Leasehold Services, Neehara Wijeyesekera, had this to say of the campaign “Jobsgopublic listened to us and understood the brief, we have saved a large amount of time and money by outsourcing this campaign. We have been really impressed with the quality of managerial candidates and would recommend Jobsgopublic services to other Public sector authorities.”

The challenges posed by this campaign required careful planning and meticulous execution for these levels of success to be achieved. We are delighted that the work that was put into this campaign has been recognised by the PPMA and with similar campaigns in the pipeline we hope that it will not be long until we are back on stage again.