Three councils to implement Abacusí Recruit recruitment management software.

Three councils to implement Abacusí Recruit recruitment management software.

Early in 2002 staff at Leicester City Council identified the fact that the process of generating and publishing recruitment advertising was unduly time consuming and repetitive, and the awkward nature of the process was delaying the recruiting process quite badly.

Part of the problem was the drafting of job and person specifications. The most significant cause for delay was the involvement of so many different departments (the initiating department, HR, Redeployment, Advertising and Job Shop, to name a few) in production and authorisation. In particular it was important to ensure adherence to legal requirements within any published advertisement.

Leicester decided to commission a web based solution, within the terms of the e-Government framework, and after a formal tender process, abacus e-media was awarded the contract. The solution was delivered in October 2002.

The resulting development has provided a host of benefits and efficiencies.

All advertisement content (standard job descriptions, discrimination clauses, etc) are stored in a database for potential re-use.

New recruitment requirements are initiated by managers, but then all relevant departments share access to those records. The system provides web based work-flow ìdashboardsî for each department, ensuring that all the necessary steps are undertaken: approval by personnel, selection of media and allocation of advertisement display dates by the advertisement department, and display on the web and in the job shop.

When ready the ads are automatically displayed on the council web sites in synchronisation with the release to printed media.

Online job applications can be collected and processed and linked to the original recruitment package.

The results:

The advertisement content can now be developed in minutes rather than hours, and its process through the organisation takes a fraction of the departmentís time. In addition progress reports show the progress of any advertisement through the organisation, highlighting bottlenecks and supporting automatic re-routing when illness or holidays interfere.

Abacus was chosen because it provided the most imaginative and effective proposal, and because of its unusual combination of IT and design skills.

Having won he contract Abacus decided to develop the solution as a package, so that it could be used by other organisations. A commercial agreement was made with Leicester, the product was named Recruit, and the company set about showing the product to other councils.

The response was enthusiastic, and two further councils have now committed to the product. Lincolnshire (the site is already live) and Derbyshire. A further two councils have committed to the product verbally.

As a by product of achieving the new orders, Abacus have been able to extend the product in a number of ways, but particularly in the ability to generate advertisement orders to print publications and jobs boards, and in providing such post application functionality as scoring, interview calendar, talent bank and forms letter generation.