Islington Council

A fresh approach to recruitment

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 talent acquisition platform to address the lack of flexibility and transparency in using Trac, to support different types of recruitment. Eploy is used for both council and school employee recruitment.

The deliverables were:

1. Implement a dedicated Applicant Tracking System to modernise the recruitment strategy. 
2. Enhance equality and diversity by deploying tools for Hiring Managers that enable anonymised recruitment and recruitment content tools for optimising inclusive and engaging communications.
3. Launch an apprenticeship and graduate scheme to offer opportunities to local residents, reflecting the borough’s demographics. 
4. Utilise recruitment analytics to increase the visibility of the end-to-end recruitment process and highlight bottlenecks and inefficiencies. 
5. Improve candidate experience with automated emails, touchpoints, multiple application forms, and recruitment workflows that drive compliance and best practices.
6. Deliver fully online 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.
7. Implement a new starter export from the ATS to Zellis (HCM/Payroll) to transfer candidate data seamlessly.
8. Deliver a dedicated candidate portal/careers site with aligned branding to the Islington Council Services and Support website.

Islington Council chose Eploy’s complete talent acquisition platform for its in-house recruitment requirements. The platform combines Applicant Tracking, Recruitment CRM, Onboarding, and Analytics to integrate seamlessly with its career site.

A fresh and dynamic approach to recruitment

With a focus on the candidate experience, from the initial requisition to onboarding, Eploy provides flexible recruitment workflows to future-proof inclusive recruitment at Islington Council. The Council has implemented variable application form flows to support the process variations required for schools and apprentices. These flows are fully flexible and can be managed independently within Eploy. In addition, the Council now has authorisation workflows to ensure the right people sign off on all vacancies. The Corporate Management Board is committed to prioritising apprenticeships as a key component of Islington Councils workforce strategy for 2023-2026. To support this, an additional authorisation step in the vacancy requisition form allows the apprenticeship team to review all Scale 6 and below vacancies to consider for apprenticeship roles first. This approach not only offers valuable opportunities for Islington residents, school leavers, and care leavers but also helps to develop a skilled and diverse workforce for the future.

The recruitment workflow has been developed depending on if the applicant is an existing employee. It continues through reviewing applications and moving candidates through the recruitment workflow. Automatic transitions have been designed so successful applications move to hiring managers or to schools that deal with recruitment independently.

Candidate Portal

The Candidate Portal is seamlessly connected to the main corporate site, incorporating information for candidates to discover more about working at Islington. The latest jobs are dynamically shown with one-click access to save jobs and apply later or find out more and apply. 

Eploy’s Candidate Portal supports the requirement to enhance equality and diversity and is independently certified by The Digital Accessibility Centre with WCAG AA Compliance conforming to current Web Content Accessibility. 

Candidates can register with social profiles to create an account, register for job alerts, and apply for multiple roles. When registering, Islington Council ask candidates to specify preferred role information to build its talent pool, utilising Eploy’s talent pooling features to automatically match the most suitable candidates for relevant vacancies using auto-skilling functionality.

Hiring Managers

Using the Hiring Manager Portal, Hiring Managers raise vacancies that are sent automatically for authorisation, helping to reduce bottlenecks and delays. Islington Council has leveraged Eploy’s Interview Booking tool for candidates to arrange interview slots online, reducing the recruitment team’s time spent scheduling. The roll-out involved hiring manager workshops, covering Council and school managers to embed the tools required to make great hires.

Onboarding

Islington Council uses Eploy’s Onboarding Module to move candidates smoothly through the onboarding process including automated reference collection. All candidate communications were redeveloped to include consistent, customised messaging. A ‘code of conduct’ is built into the onboarding process to outline guidelines of the standards, values and company expectations.

Another improvement is the ability to upload a photo for an ID card to be created for the new hire, ready for day one. Automated onboarding and a candidate-led process is a huge step forward on the previous process from an audit perspective, which involved manual clearance and checking and manual candidate communications.

Onboarding includes effectively onboarding temporary agency staff who become permanent. A New Starter Export from Eploy to Zellis (HCM/Payroll) reduces manual input of candidate data for payroll entry. Candidate data is seamlessly exported once a candidate is ‘checked’ and ‘ready’. This incorporates a message from the Chief Executive to further build on candidate engagement.

Recruitment Improvements to enhance strategic thinking

“Enhancing in recruitment will help us achieve the savings needed at Islington for 2025/2026, while maintaining our commitment to providing the highest quality services to our residents.”

Rob Stoner, Senior Lead Recruitment at Islington Council, commented on the programme’s successes, “We have implemented a recruitment solution to give managers the tools they need to be effective. I feel incredibly proud of the work we have done so far as a team and what we plan to do in the future.

“Our first 12 months were all about enhancing the candidate experience. The following 12 months are focussed on enhancing our hiring manager experience as well as more inclusive recruitment - with an ambitious aim of being the top London Borough for recruitment experience and inclusivity.

“Eploy’s platform runs a very comprehensive process for you. It is easy to navigate how far candidates are through t

“There is an internal first approach to recruitment for relevant roles that support internal career progression, opening up opportunities for existing staff and supporting diverse representation at all levels. Eploy allows us to monitor the outcome of the approach and track the percentage of internal hires and all roles. We can monitor our Diverse Recruiters Scheme interview panels as part of our commitment to challenge inequality in our workplace.

The structured review forms in Eploy allow us to automate the capture of this information to ensure diversity of panels by race and gender to help take more balanced decisions. 86% of all interview panels consisted of ethnic diversity and 78% consisted of gender diversity. The aim is to increase this to near 100% and expand to shortlisting. The additional authorisation step in the vacancy requisition form allows the apprenticeship team to review all roles to consider for apprenticeship first. This is working successfully, with 7% of all external hires joining the Council as an apprentice in the last 12 months.

“The recruitment data from Eploy is rich and extensive across vacancies, applications, source of hire and diversity. 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.”

Candidate feedback

Islington Council uses Eploy to collect candidate feedback and measure candidate experience through the recruitment process to provide a Net Promoter Score.

“…..the whole experience has been smooth sailing” “Everything about Islington Council recruitment and hiring is good”

“Interview team were brilliant. Communication was clear. Once HR recruitment team were engaged and process triggered, things started moving at pace. A big thank you to those involved.”

“…. I like the fact that any information entered at the onboarding stage seemed to get saved automatically.”

“I was impressed how efficient, friendly and competent the entire process and the communication were. I felt valued and respected and at the centre of my application process. Thank you Islington!”

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 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!”

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