When you’ve been building award-wining homes for 40 years, you’re definitely doing something right. From the quality of the design and the construction, to the customer service that runs alongside ensuring customers have homes, not houses, Redrow are serious about their business. But they’re serious about their people too. They have around 1,400 people working from 12 regional divisions. Planning, design and construction are naturally at the heart of the business. But as they’ve grown, it’s clear they’ve needed to recruit the right people to support the business and keep it performing at its best.
This is why they have a broad range of careers in support functions such as finance, IT, HR, training, customer services, health and safety and administration. They’ve also a wide variety of trainees’ programmes for both school leavers and graduates – taking on 100 trainees this year alone. Perhaps that explains why they’re listed in the Times Top 100 Apprenticeships and 5% Club, actively encouraging the recruitment of apprentices and graduates.
They’re progressive in all they do. And nowhere is that more noticeable than in their purpose built training centre in Tamworth, where they tailor their induction and training to the individual so that they’re fulfilling their potential. So it should come as no real surprise that a company that’s this committed to quality and development would want to apply that to their recruitment process too. So we went to talk to them about how HARBOUR ATS could help.
Our original brief was to build an ATS to support the nice new slick website they were developing and to work with their agency to make sure it all happened. To start, the brief was pretty straightforward. Granted, there were some additional pieces they wanted so that the system matched how they worked, such as a vacancy and offer authorisation functionality. They also wanted their job postings in HARBOUR ATS to ‘live feed’ to their website. Naturally we were more than happy to oblige.
However, as we learned a bit more about them, and they learned a bit more about us… they realised we might be able to help them with some other aspects that would add value to their process. But, as is often the case, changing requirements don’t always come with a change in deadlines. They’ve got a business to run after all. Add to the mix that we’re trying to back it all into the website their agency is building and it all adds up to an exhilarating ride.
In fact, it’s where our new strapline ‘The agile ATS’ really had to live up to its name. However thanks to a great relationship with the team at Redrow, we all realised that if you work together pretty much anything’s achievable. So we did exactly that. We changed the site structure to accommodate different business areas. We adapted the vacancy authorisation functionality so that they could choose either from a drop down of existing users or dynamically enter additional authorisers to the database. And we did the same for the offer process too.
We’re no push over. Yet we listen to our clients’ needs and we discuss them – drawing on our expertise to decide where we bend and where we respectfully challenge. It’s a way of working that is productive for both our clients and for us. Redrow gets an ATS that’s time-saving, accelerates the candidate process and provides speedy vacancy posting (we’re also scheduled to discuss with them our OnBoarding capability and a potential integration with E-learning suppliers so watch this space). And in return we get great satisfaction from making our clients happy and pushing HARBOUR ATS to be even better. And as we evolve to accommodate ever-changing website needs, we get the chance to live up to our name, making us one of the most flexible ATS around. Redrow are even happy to tell you how they feel about it.
“Thanks for all your wonderful and very prompt help! It’s a fantastic system – I love it!” Ruth Watson, Redrow.
“We’ve found 3DMarcomms to be very responsive to our requests – from the initial project management of getting the system up and running, to the aftercare support once live. They’ve also been totally flexible by building in new processes as we’ve realised opportunities to become even more efficient.” Martin Gilpin, Human Resources Manager, Redrow
See www.redrowcareers.co.uk for more information about careers with one of the largest and most acclaimed housebuilders in the UK.