A positive impact on recruiting for Early Years Alliance

Early Years Alliance is the largest and most representative early years membership organisation in England. The Alliance represents 14,000 member settings and supports them to deliver care and learning to over 800,000 families every year.

The Alliance actively campaigns on behalf of members to influence and improve early years policy and practice. The organisation offers Alliance members high quality information and advice, produce specialist publications, run acclaimed training, deliver professional development and quality improvement support. They provide Alliance members with access to 24-hour legal advice and comprehensive, competitive insurance tailored specifically for their childcare service.

A registered educational charity, the Alliance also provides high quality affordable childcare, family support and education for children and their families throughout England. The Alliance is one of the largest providers of childcare in England. Alliance settings are committed to learning through play, parental involvement and creating inclusive, nurturing environments for children in our care.

Alliance employees

The charity employs over 1300 across England working in their National Centre office in London, 9 service hubs and 70 early years settings across the country. Alliance staff provide professional support to members and provide essential services.

A growing charity, the Alliance relies on a range of skilled, experienced and committed professionals and childcare practitioners to help them to deliver this important work. Career opportunities include childcare workers and practitioners, early years professionals and voluntary sector specialists for a range of roles.

Attracting the best

The Alliance is committed to developing and retaining their professional workforce. Every employee receives access to a comprehensive staff development training and induction programme. As a major early years employer, the Alliance is regularly recruiting new employees who are interested in making a positive contribution to the learning, development and care of very young children.

The charity has Investors in People status and is committed to ensuring transparency, equality and inclusive practice in all their recruitment processes. To ensure every potential employee receives a consistent and positive experience, the Alliance has invested in new a recruitment tool.

Eploy offers a user-friendly and efficient way for them manage their recruitment process. Potential employees recruitment journey from initial enquiry to final stage offer is more seamless for everyone involved in the recruitment process, including their 150 Hiring Managers.

The Recruitment and HR Team realised that combining Applicant Tracking, Recruitment CRM, Talent Pooling and access to real-time analytics would position them ahead of the competition, at a time when less people are entering early years as a career.

Eploy was chosen because it was scalable and flexible and positioned the Alliance to recruit smoothly and attract the right quality and quantity of candidates for advertised roles.
The implementation of Eploy has provided candidates with a portal that provides a first-class candidate experience for job search and secure candidate profile pages. Candidates can register and apply for roles and Eploy automatically extracts all key information from a candidates CV. Hiring Managers can also be more involved throughout the recruitment process accessing key information across all stages.

Michelle Brown, HR Business Partner, commented on the launch “Eploy has given us the ability to really streamline our hiring workflow which has reduced calls to the Recruitment Team through a collaborative approach with Hiring Managers. We used to receive CV’s and applications via an inbox which was not efficient or effective. We can now use email and SMS to prompt candidates to confirm their interview slots, offering self-service selection and flexibility – all designed to engage with candidates”.

Chris Bogh, CTO at Eploy added “This is another example of how Eploy’s portals deliver a great experience for all involved in the recruitment process. It is providing the right tools across the recruitment journey to provide an excellent experience for all.”