Portman Building Society makes wise investment in E-Recruitment

Jobpartners, the European company of software solutions dedicated to the PRM (People Relationship Management) market, today announced that Portman Building Society has rolled out ActiveRecruiter, Jobpartners’ online recruitment solution, to optimise its recruitment process in the UK. By implementing ActiveRecruiter to manage the entire sourcing process, Portman Building Society hopes to improve awareness of its career opportunities and attract quality candidates. The company also anticipates that the solution will help further enhance the employer brand, improve the cost per hire ratio, and ensure FSA regulations are met.

Having reviewed our People Strategy it was clear to us that we needed to improve awareness of the careers and different job roles available at Portman Building Society. This will assist us in attracting and retaining quality staff, in order to ensure that our customers receive an excellent service, explained Ann Elliot, Director of HR at Portman Building Society. The implementation of Jobpartners’ ActiveRecruiter will help us to achieve this in a number of ways. Firstly, it will widen our visibility as we can advertise online and directly attract candidates. Secondly, we can ensure that we attract the right kind of employees by ensuring our site contains strong messaging regarding our company culture. ActiveRecruiter will also enable us to build up a talent pool of individuals, who may wish to work with us, which we can access in the future.

Portman Building Society has worked closely with SHL and Jobpartners to link its recruitment site to a number of online psychometric testing tools, which have been customised to help the company match potential employees to the profiles of some of its most popular job roles. ActiveRecruiter can be integrated with all the key online assessment tools available on the market.

Although ActiveRecruiter was only recently implemented, it is already helping to increase the efficiency of Portman Building Society’s recruitment process. Prior to its implementation, the company had a paper and email based process for administering applications but with an average of 100 CVs coming in every day, this was very labour intensive. The recruitment process is now completely automated and the company has a single source for all its recruitment information, which is helping to make the process more consistent. By managing recruitment more effectively and ensuring a faster response to potential employees, ActiveRecruiter is helping to create a better candidate experience.

As an Employer of Choice, our employer brand was already strong, however by streamlining our sourcing process ActiveRecruiter supports our employer brand and will help us to greatly enhance it over time. This in turn will help us to achieve greater attraction and retention of talented people, explained Ann Elliot. Cost and time savings will also be a key benefit in the long term, as we expect to be able to reduce our reliance on agencies and search firms and reduce administration.

In addition, ActiveRecruiter helps Portman Building Society to ensure its recruitment processes comply with the Financial Services Authority’s (FSA) regulations, which is a critical business issue for the company. For example, ActiveRecruiter ensures the correct candidate data is collected during the recruitment process, provides a full audit trail of all recruitment activity, and triggers the necessary background checks on candidates.

Portman Building Society rolled out Jobpartners’ ActiveRecruiter after a successful pilot phase to manage the entire sourcing process. It is now used to recruit for roles which vary from Head Office positions to customer advisors for its 146 branches.

The decision was made to work with Jobpartners as the company is very flexible in its approach and was prepared to work in close partnership with us to ensure ActiveRecruiter was customised to meet our exact needs, Ann Elliot commented.

ActiveRecruiter is part of ActiveSuite, Jobpartners’ family of People Relationship Management software solutions developed to help organisations attract, develop and retain the right people and meet business goals.