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London’s Brent Council halves recruitment costs and time with StepStone Solutions

26 February 2010: London’s Brent Council has announced it has implemented StepStone Solutions E-recruitment to manage online recruitment across the council. The StepStone solution is expected to significantly reduce the average time to hire and carries the potential to cut advertising spend by as much as £300,000.

After an in-depth procurement process Brent Council, which has 3,500 employees, chose StepStone Solutions’ e-recruitment technology to move from a combination of paper based and online processes to an entirely digital approach. By replacing administration-intensive manual processes the system is predicted to reduce the time taken to process applicants by over 50 per cent, in addition to retaining key data that will drive a more informed and cost effective placement of job adverts in the future.

As an extremely busy public sector organisation Brent Council’s recruitment challenges were compounded by the nature of its advertising process for new vacancies: each newly-available job position over the past month was posted on the same day. The resulting flood of applications, coupled with paper-based processes, made life difficult for the council’s recruitment team. Since the implementation of StepStone Solutions E-recruitment Brent Council has already experienced an instant decrease in workload and burden around application processing, allowing employees to focus on other business critical tasks.

Meanwhile, the candidate screening capability of StepStone Solutions E-recruitment has led to an increase in the quality and suitability of candidates being put forward for positions. In addition, the Council has more time to dedicate to each candidate, improving the quality of the application experience. Whereas applicants would previously only be contacted if they had been successful, Brent Council can now interact with every single applicant and provide individual feedback based on their success or otherwise.

Brent Council’s operations manager, Andrew James says: “Prior to going live with StepStone Solutions we could be swamped by hundreds of calls and paper CVs after posting vacancies. Since StepStone Solutions covers every stage in the recruitment process we now only need to deal with a small number by hand. The roll-out has paved the way for us to revisit other processes and look at where further efficiencies can be introduced.”

Matthew Parker, Group Managing Director, StepStone Solutions adds: “Our e-recruitment solution provides a solid capability for recruitment at all levels of the public sector and it’s great to announce how we have helped Brent Council cut time to hire and improve the candidate experience overall. As public sector organisations must often compete with the private sector for talent, efficient processes and a professional candidate experience are vital.”

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