‘Our old ATS was the M25 of recruitment processing. With HARBOUR, it’s like Highway 54. No palaver, straight through from end to end, and you get to your destination in really quick time.’
Jewish Care are regulated by the Care Quality Commission, the Charity Commission and the Nursing and Midwifery Council. They needed a new Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to give them robust processes for compliance plus a faster, smoother recruitment ride for hiring managers and candidates. We’ll leave it to Scott Bateman, Jewish Care’s projects, systems and resourcing manager, to explain what we did…
‘Our onboarding was in the Stone Age’
Pre-HARBOUR, our ATS was little more than a checklist. We didn’t have any system integration so recruiters were reliant on manual processes – filling out DBS forms and looking through CVs to check there weren’t any gaps. Then they’d have to go back into the ATS to tick a box to confirm it had been done.
CVs were shared over email. References were stored offline. Contracts and offer letters were emailed.
With HARBOUR, as part of the second-stage application you can fill out the working history and the address history – so you’re gathering all that information in one place. And, crucially, the system won’t allow you to process and complete the application if there any gaps. That’s reduced a lot of issues with DBS but also kept us compliant with CQC regulations.
‘HARBOUR’s onboarding is a winner for me. Our onboarding process is now seamless, robust and very secure. There’s no one I’ve come across who does it better, particularly in a compliance-related industry like ours.’
‘Flexibility is key’
I’ve worked with a lot of system providers who were very inflexible in their approach. The system did what they said it did, but if your working environment changed there was a lot of resistance from them to changing their system.
When we launched our new employee brand and careers site HARBOUR did a lot of work, which involved redoing HTML feeds and moving away from the static careers page that they hosted to using an integration to push the jobs into a page hosted by us. That was something they hadn’t done previously, but they were completely open to doing it and they delivered fantastically for us.
You’d struggle to get that from another provider. Either they’d have said no or we would’ve had to say no because the cost was so astronomical.
When you don’t have that flexibility, you either have to change your internal processes to fit the system – which probably won’t deliver the process you want – or you half the process, and then bypass it because you’re having to take it offline. Thanks to HARBOUR’s bespoke system, we didn’t have to go down either of those routes.
‘We had the Rubik’s Cube of recruitment’
With our old ATS the hiring managers had a dashboard – but it was effectively just a list of candidates, with absolutely no information. To be able to review a CV, it took about 20 clicks to get there. I’m always looking for the quickest way to get from A to B – and this wasn’t it! It was like grappling with a Rubik’s Cube.
With HARBOUR’S hiring manager portal, candidates get updated at almost every stage of the process and have self-selection for interviews – so they can log into their email, click a button to accept an interview slot and get instant email confirmation.
Hiring managers can put their availability for interviews into the system’s calendar and receive confirmation when a candidate has accepted a slot, along with an iCal they can drop straight into their Outlook calendar. HARBOUR also integrates with our own Microsoft Teams package so links can be automatically generated instead of doing it manually outside the system.
It sounds really simple but it cuts out all the back and forth with phone calls, emails and checking schedules. The amount of time and effort it saves is huge.
‘Dashboard reporting you can see at a glance’
The data we got from our old ATS was very basic. And it needed a lot of manual manipulation to make the data meaningful and to be able to present it in a way that was easy to understand. When I took over the recruitment portfolio, my first question to the recruitment business partner was ‘How many vacancies have we got?’ It took two days to get an answer.
Without any visibility it was really challenging to keep hiring managers up to date with the progress of their vacancy and they were chasing the recruitment and HR services team to ask when their candidate was starting.
Now, for every single activity you can go into the system and view it. You can see who’s had an email, what time it was sent, what it said, whether it’s been read or not, when a request was raised, how long vacancies have been open – and a whole lot more.
‘HARBOUR offers a robust solution that effectively streamlines and enhances our recruitment efforts. Reporting gives us the metrics we need to drive recruitment strategies forward. Integration with media sources allows us to instantly post vacancies across numerous sources simultaneously. Customer Service and Support is excellent, with speedy response times usually the same day.’
Darren Martin, Recruitment Business Partner
‘We can now fast track from offer to contract’
Our previous system was very poor from a candidate communication perspective. We had a lot of candidates dropping out because they’d been offered roles but then weren’t being kept informed.
Now, as soon as the hiring manager has verbally offered the job they can go into HARBOUR, fill in the offer details and click a button to send it to the HR services team, who’ll then check the details, click a button and a contract is automatically generated and sent to the candidate.
‘Using HARBOUR has speeded up our onboarding process – with some candidates taking less than 48 hours to process.’
Hilary Fletcher, HR Service Lead, Jewish Care
Want us to accelerate your processes and get you on the right recruitment road? (Sorry, but Scott started us on this driving analogy). We’d love to chat – so why not get in touch .