Islington Council Make an Impact on Recruitment

Islington Council is committed to eliminating discrimination, valuing diversity, and looking for opportunities to build community cohesion in everything it does. This ambition also applies to the programme to modernise its recruitment strategy and processes.

Islington Council's Recruitment Team supports many recruitment types including education, health and social care and apprenticeships. With a legacy Applicant Tracking System (ATS), no longer meeting its requirements, Islington Council implemented Eploy's complete recruitment platform to address the lack of flexibility in supporting different types of recruitment, which now promotes cohesion of the Recruitment Team, Hiring Managers and Candidates alike.

Requirements to modernise the recruitment strategy:

1.  Enhance equality and diversity by deploying tools for anonymised recruitment for Hiring Managers and recruitment content tools for optimising inclusive and engaging communications.
2.  By utilising recruitment analytics to gain greater visibility of the end-to-end recruitment process to highlight any bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
3.  Improve candidate experience with automated emails, touchpoints, multiple application forms, and recruitment workflows that drive compliance and best practice.
4.  Onboarding within the recruitment platform to support two-stage onboarding, collecting varying levels of necessary information relative to the role type with e-signatures of contracts.
5.  Provide a New Starter Export from Eploy to ResourceLink (HR/Payroll).
6.  Dedicated candidate portal/careers site brand matched to Islington Council Services and Support website.

With a focus on the candidate experience, from the initial recruitment process to onboarding, Eploy provides flexible recruitment workflows to future-proof inclusive recruitment at Islington Council.

Rob Stoner, Senior Lead Recruitment at Islington Council, commented on the programme's successes, "I feel incredibly proud of the work we have done so far as a team and what we plan to do in the future.

"One month since launching Islington Council's new Applicant Tracking System (ATS) with Eploy and we're already seeing massive improvements. Our average time to create a vacancy requisition has more than halved, and reference requests are returning within hours - not days.

"In terms of the recruitment experience/onboarding process so far, I've been impressed. Eploy's platform runs a very comprehensive process for you, but one that is easy to navigate in terms of candidates seeing how far they are through the process, clearly stepping through the provision of all the information required. On a process-related point, the system prompts for referee information to then immediately send the reference requests. A great bit of automation that is designed to reduce some of the HR workload on this step.

"The biggest benefit is the ability to make so many amendments ourselves. We're still learning and taking on board every piece of feedback we receive to make sure that this is a system that works for us, hiring managers and candidates.

What I'm most proud of is how every single person in my team has played a part in this. From procurement to development, testing and launch, we've all taken ownership of this and it's ours."

After just one month….

Check out the recruitment stats after Islington Council’s first month of using Eploy:

What the team had to say…

The feedback from across the business and candidates who have been through the process demonstrates how Islington Council has successfully modernised its recruitment strategy and processes.

>Future proof recruitment solution

"My team and I are feeling incredibly positive about the work we've done so far, what we're currently doing, and what we can do to achieve more in the future. The freedom to modernise our recruitment processes is incredible, and we're excited to take the next steps towards truly future-proof inclusive recruiting at Islington Council!" Rob Stoner, Senior Lead Recruitment

> Ease of use

"It is a breeze to use, my team has used it a few times already. In fairness, the recruitment team have been on hand to assist whenever needed, a big thumbs up to them." 

> Candidate feedback

"We’ve already had candidate feedback to say it’s the best they’ve used so far!” 

> Digital Accessibility

“Eploy have done a great job on the digital accessibility side of things. Great to see the needs of disabled users being accommodated”. 

> Inclusive recruitment

“Great feedback so far from both managers and candidates about the system. Courage to work with a new partner who can meet our needs for flexibility and inclusive recruitment - fantastic work team!” 

Find out more

You can find out more about careers at Islington Council, what it means to be part of the team and the ‘Islington Together’ vision.