The National College for School Leadership
Calibrated Outsourced Recruitment
Barkers were retained in 2004 by The National College for School Leadership (NCSL or The College) to provide an effective support service in the seamless delivery of recruitment at the College.
In the first instance we placed a small team in-house recruitment team at NCSL whilst offering Project Management that covered all aspects of recruitment and the process from authorisation of the vacancy (internal or external) through to offer.
We established some short and long term aims at the outset and we can confirm that all of these have been achieved:
2004 - To decrease the cost per hire and increase the level of quality candidates. The cost per hire in 2004 when we started working with NCSL was £2,300.
2006 - We have recently successfully re-tendered for this business. The cost per hire is now £1,200 which demonstrates a reduction of 48% since 2004.
2004 - Design and develop a recruitment website that linked straight through to the online candidate management system. The number of online applications account for c15% of applications to NCSL.
2006 - At the 2006 review we could confirm that c98% of applications are online. This clearly demonstrates the ease that candidates have with the viewing of information and applying online.
2004 - Map the recruitment process and implement it into the College.
2006 - These processes have been extremely successful and continue to be operated.
2004 - Review assessment practices and tools in the marketplace and conduct a workshop with NCSL.
2006 - Our in-house Occupational Psychologist delivered this workshop within the first year of the contract and Barkers have continued to update NCSL with new tools coming to the market.
2004 - Design and create bespoke exercises for use at assessment centres.
2006 - Barkers in-house Occupational Psychologist has worked closely with NCSL to design and deliver a number of bespoke assessment centre exercises for administrative positions.
2004 - Design the talent banking process and then develop it with the online providers.
2006 - Our Project Manager for this account has assisted the College over the last two years in the design of the talent banking process both from the candidate experience perspective and the candidate management perspective.
During the first six months of this contract, Barkers were in close liaison with NCSL in order to scope out the processes and plan the achievement of the goals detailed above.
Whilst we had our Recruiters on-site, our Project Manager also spent one day per week at the College to review the recruitment plan for both internal and external vacancies. It would be at this time that we would contribute to the resource plan for each vacancy.
The services that NCSL use are numerous and Barkers support the recruitment of over 100 internal and extern vacancies for the College over a year. Our services include: full candidate management, response management, assessment design, assessing, interviewing, screening, process mapping, management of online candidate management system, co-ordination of the attraction strategy, conducting workshops and managing and reviewing the effectiveness of the entire process.