How Eploy is helping Education Development Trust become an employer of choice

Education Development Trust is an international not-for-profit organisation that has been helping to improve education systems with and on behalf of governments around the world for 50 years. Their work is evidence informed and the organisation invests annually in a programme of publicly available education research.

Education Development Trust’s portfolio is diverse – from running programmes in Kenya that ensure marginalised girls go to school and stay in school to encouraging young physics and maths graduates in England to pursue a career in teaching and from ensuring the National Careers Service delivers life-changing careers advice to improving learner outcomes in maths and English in every school in Rwanda.

Recruitment needs

As a values-led organisation with charitable status and a strong social purpose, Education Development Trust relies on exceptional people to deliver around the world. They recruit for a diverse range of roles such as education consultants, business support roles, teachers and support for language teaching on a local, national and global scale, covering a mix of short- and long-term positions. Their recruitment needs are therefore multiple and complex with slightly differing requirements across departments; they have offices in the UK, Africa, the Middle East, India and south-east Asia supported by a team of in-house expert recruiters to ensure they have the right people in the right roles at the right time.

It was this complexity, and an outdated recruitment system with browser and usability limitations, that prompted Education Development Trust to explore alternative recruitment systems that better suited their needs. They wanted to provide the best possible experience for their candidates as well as a seamless recruitment journey for their in-house recruitment and global resourcing teams. They also wanted a system that could integrate with their existing payroll and finance system.

The Recruitment and Global Resourcing team chose Eploy to deliver their complete recruitment journey as it would best support line managers with their recruitment and resourcing needs with the flexible functionality required for an enhanced candidate experience.

Education Development Trust had clear objectives:

• Deliver a greatly enhanced candidate experience when applying for roles or consultancy opportunities
• Deliver a unified web-based system, fully mobile responsive to work across every platform
• Enable recruiting managers to review and feedback on talent
• Enable more efficient interview scheduling
• Facilitate greater engagement and communication with consultants and job applicants
• Enable performance tracking of consultants
• Provide more efficient onboarding for sharing and collecting key documentation and information prior to joining the organisation. 

Suzie Walker led the project at Education Development Trust: “The new recruitment portal for Education Development Trust and CfBT Brunei career sites ensures that candidates and consultants registering to work with Education Development Trust, or applying for vacancies, will have a greatly enhanced experience both at application and onboarding stages, as well as bringing great benefits for hiring managers and recruiters throughout the business such as improved speed to review and shortlist candidates, arranging interviews and engaging with candidates.”

A proactive approach

Education Development Trust has been proactive in communicating with their trusted network of consultants to encourage registration for current and future opportunities, highlighting the benefits of easy document upload and candidates having full control to set up job alerts, track and access documentation, all in line with new GDPR regulations so they can continue to work together.

Engagement with new hires is now improved through better screening, reduced time spent by hiring managers scheduling interviews and the online onboarding and contracting capability to securely access, download and digitally sign contracts and assignment documentation wherever applicants are deployed in the world. This has been great for global reach to automate and speed up the process, reducing paper through features such as the esignature tool which enables contracting arrangements to be managed online via any tablet or smartphone.

"Within the first hour of going live we received nearly 70 registrations to the new portal which is a positive indication of both our consultants’ commitment to us as an organisation and the ease of use of our new recruitment solution. We will be managing candidate relationships with passive and active candidates so we can recruit proactively through our new talent pool capability,” commented Richard Fields, Resourcing and Talent Adviser at Education Development Trust.

Later phases of the project will involve working with colleagues in other regional offices.

Chris Bogh, CEO at Eploy commented: “Education Development Trust have challenged themselves in a practical and collaborative way to really improve their recruitment process for efficiency. The new recruitment system from Eploy has been integrated with their careers site which has resulted in a smooth candidate registration process and streamlined automation enabling Education Development Trust to continue to bring expertise to complex global educational problems”.