Birmingham City Council’s recruitment team’s commercial work put on hold

An award-winning initiative by Birmingham City Council’s recruitment team has been put on hold because of massive restructuring at the council.
Mon, 22 Jun 2015 | By Colin Cottell

An award-winning initiative by Birmingham City Council’s recruitment team has been put on hold because of massive restructuring at the council (right). 

The success of the initiative, which saw the team successfully sell its recruitment expertise to outside employers, was recognised in May when the council picked up Recruiter’s Best Public Sector In-house Recruitment Team Award, sponsored by H1 Healthcare, at May’s Recruiter Awards, in association with Anderson Group. 

The team’s traded activity with both outside bodies and internally generated £380k for the cash-strapped council in 2014.  

However, according to Glen Knott, senior HR practitioner for people resourcing and in-source at the council, the recruitment team’s income-generating activity has been put on hold for the time being. Knott explains that with budget cuts forcing the council to reduce its workforce by up to 7,000, the recruitment team has been asked “to focus all its energies on the massive internal task of organisational downsizing affecting Birmingham”.

Knott tells Recruiter: “We have put the traded activity on hold for now. All our energy is on the in-house work.

“We don’t know when we will be returning to the commercial work,” Knott continues. “We are going to review it in a couple of months after we have got this internal work out of the way.”

Adapting to change is nothing new to the council’s 35-strong recruitment team, however. Indeed, it was the way that the team seized the opportunity presented by huge upheaval at the council to transform both itself and its performance that was a major factor in it winning the accolade of Best Public Sector In-House Recruitment Team.

In a story of triumph over adversity, the judges were impressed with how Birmingham City’s recruitment team reinvented itself through new ways of working against a backdrop of massive and ongoing cuts in the council’s budget from £1.4bn in 2010 to £840m in 2017/18, resulting in a halving of the size of the HR department to 223 staff. 

“It is when one is starving that one becomes most resourceful. It forced us to critically evaluate everything,” Knott explains.

Among the examples of the 35-strong recruitment team’s resourcefulness was its success in selling its services to outside organisations, believed to be a first for a local council. Oxfordshire County Council, Southampton City Council and Land Registry were among those who used the team’s expertise in search and selection for mainly senior roles, right up to candidate shortlisting.  

The team also worked with niche public sector recruiter Jobsgopublic. After advertising jobs on behalf of local authorities, Jobsgopublic sub-contracted search and selection (though not the final hiring decision) to the council’s team. 

“It was multi-faceted,” says Knott, and included hiring manager and candidate feedback, and sometimes the development of assessment centres. A key selling point was the team’s approach, he adds. “We are not sales people, we are professional HR people – that is how we approached the work.” 

Although competing directly with private agencies, Knott says rising demand from outside bodies led to a waiting list of clients. “We don’t fit the mould of local government recruitment workers; we are commercially very savvy, and committed to delivering the best quality service at the best price,” adds Knott. The team’s external trading activity, along with internal trading of its HR services within the council, generated income of £380k in 2014.  

Knott says the team’s traded activity was driven by senior HR directors, “who are very keen for us to be as commercial as possible and to cover our own costs by generating income so we are not a burden on the council”.

Actively involving staff in coming up with new and better ways of doing things, and ideas on services that can be traded, was also key. “Because they [staff] helped to shape it, they were committed to it – it was not imposed on them,” explains Knott.

Barry Pirie, Public Service People Managers’ Association president, tells Recruiter that the current environment of austerity in local government is forcing councils to challenge previous assumptions about HR. He says one approach “is to identify the HR support services which could also be revenue generators rather than cost centres. 

“Recruitment is a natural candidate for this, given the profile of person we need to bring into local government and the understanding we have of the specific challenges in recruiting into the sector. 

“While it is hard to identify this as a trend, I do expect that where HR teams provide a solid commercial basis for this approach, their organisations will welcome the opportunity to consider a different way of doing things.”

Beyond the judges’ recognition of the team’s commercial acumen, several other aspects of the team’s work stood out and contributed to the council winning the Award. These were:

• Constant streamlining of recruitment processes. For example, the number of touch points when placing a job advert was cut, helping to reduce time-to-fill from 60 to 38 days. 

• The team successfully implemented the council’s commitment to look to fill vacancies from existing staff first, with 86% filled internally. With half of these at risk of redundancy, the team’s career transition service saved the council nearly £2m in recruitment and redundancy costs in supporting existing 78 staff into new posts.   

“It’s a partnership approach,” says Knott, citing how the team trains the council’s hiring managers in all aspects of selection and recruitment, “helping to build competence, knowledge and reduce complaints”. 

• 134 social care workers were recruited following the development of an online talent pool. 

With the team’s numbers hit by budget cuts, Knott says that enhancing the skills of the recruitment team through training “so that they can work across the complete range of services the team provides” has been vital. “This means we can flex as and when the business needs require,” he says. 

At a time of massive and continuing upheaval at Birmingham City Council, necessity truly is the mother of invention for this resourceful recruitment team.

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