Hertfordshire County Council

Recognising that recruitment is not its core business, Hertfordshire County Council broke new ground when it became the first Local Authority to outsource its entire recruitment needs – both temporary and permanent – to Manpower. The Council was looking for an innovative solution to attract and retain the skills it needed in the most cost-effective way.

Job-specific recruitment 

Hertfordshire County Council is the largest employer in the county, with over 32,000 staff – from school-crossing attendants to board managers. So a one-size-fits-all recruitment process for vacancies was not an option. That’s why we designed an approach that could be tailored to suit each role being filled.

Pre-screening candidates

For example, when it came to catering staff, Hertfordshire County Council found hundreds of people responded to recruitment campaigns and filled out long applications form – only for the Council to find the majority of applicants were poor quality. So, instead, we introduced revised advertising and a pre-screen of ‘Killer Questions’ to provide us with a shorter but better-quality list of candidates.

Streamlined applications

To modify the selection further, appropriate candidates were invited to a face-to-face interview within one week of their initial application. Only then were the best candidates asked to complete the full application form. This new process allows us to establish a retained pool of suitable staff and improve the recruitment timeline, while also dramatically improving the candidate experience too.

Managing change

We developed an interactive recruitment process and automated the process of applicant data into Hertfordshire County Council’s own SAP HR system. A Manpower project manager provided a ‘translation service’ between HR and technical teams, to aid mutual understanding of the drivers behind each department. When the system was live, we also provided a high level of support to HR and hiring managers to assist with the culture change in moving to a new way of managing recruitment.

Temporary-to-permanent staff

As part of the same monthly meeting, we evaluate the current temporary staff who have completed significant lengths of employment, and decide on an individual basis whether they should transfer onto permanent contracts. We have brought our temporary processes into line with their permanent equivalent, allowing this planned recruitment strategy to significantly reduce advertising expenditure and save managers’ time.

Managing talent

Between 60-70% of our applicants regularly go through the website. When applicants apply via other routes, their data is still entered into the same system. By consolidating our temporary and permanent recruitment of staff, we’ve developed a pool of talent that is culturally and geographically aligned to the Council’s needs. The number of candidates in this pool is now over 1,600. Which means the Council’s reliance on external advertising has also dropped, along with time to hire.

Recruitment cost savings

Our work has reduced Hertfordshire County Council’s seven-figure recruitment budget by 5%. By managing a network of secondary suppliers and recruiting a pool of primary supply staff, we’ve controlled both pay rates and margins, resulting in significant savings.

Increasing efficiency

We’ve also dramatically reduced the time Council management devotes to recruitment, and substantially lowered its admin processing costs. One way we did this was by quickly cutting the number of supplier agencies from 100 to just 19, reducing the number of invoices from 19,000 a year to only 840 almost immediately.

Ongoing commitment

Each year we now manage 1.5 million hours of temporary supply and 1,500 permanent vacancies for Hertfordshire County Council. Our innovative recruitment solutions have helped reduce costs, simplify and speed-up the recruitment process and deliver better management information, and resulted in our initial five-year contract being renewed for a further seven-to-ten years.

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