Good progress being made with our recruitment
This year we will start to administer Adult Disability Payment across Scotland. We will also extend Scottish Child Payment to children under 16. This – and the start of the transfer of clients from the DWP to new Scottish benefits – will see the number of people we support dramatically increase and the work involved in this will become more complex. To get ready for this, we are actively recruiting a large number of new colleagues. And we are pleased to say we are making good progress with this.
Last year we announced that we expected to welcome 2,000 new colleagues by the end of 2022. Given the recent competitive nature of the labour market due to the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic this was quite a task to undertake.
A huge amount of work has been put in to be able to attract and recruit people on time. This included making our recruitment more accessible and inclusive through the introduction of user tested processes. We’ve also been busy running virtual workshops for people who are interested in applying and providing 'preparing for interview' workshops for certain roles to help people who get through the initial application stages. We recorded the workshops too and we’ve had over 12,000 views. These resources are there to be used by everyone but we’re finding have helped those returning to the workforce after a period of time and those looking to join us from other sectors of the economy.
Recently, as COVID-19 restrictions have eased, we’ve been holding in-person workshops and attended careers fairs at a variety of locations across Scotland including Dundee and Abertay Universities and Job Centres.
A new stakeholder partnership has been built with the Discover Work team from Dundee City Council. We have also teamed up with Glasgow City Council and Clyde Gateway to engage candidates in west central Scotland. The team has worked to set up skills academies with organisations who help people into work to up-skill their staff on how they can support people who wish to apply to work with us. The real success from these sessions was shown in an increase in pass rate for our second Client Manager campaign run earlier this year.
We’ve worked hard to promote our jobs including through paid for advertising and our own social media channels. We tested our creative approach with stakeholders who support people from diverse backgrounds ahead of launch to make sure our material was accessible and appealed to as many as possible. The overall engagement plan for this project has resulted in record numbers of applications for recent campaigns.
Our recruitment activity continues across a range of roles and specialisms. We are regularly advertising jobs in areas such as Digital, Health and Social Care, Finance and Project Management. It is well worth keeping an eye on our jobs page for new opportunities and sharing these with your network.
More than 1,500 new offers of employment have now been made. This large amount of people showing a real interest in working for us is really positive and underlines how attractive our roles are.
The diversity of our new staff was a key aim for this recruitment. Analysis shows that the make-up of the group joining us better reflects wider Scottish society. We still need to work hard in this area to maintain and further improve the range of valuable and varied experiences that our staff bring to work.
Our new recruits will make sure that we are ready to scale up and deliver the best service we can for our clients now and well into the future.
We will be continuing to recruit throughout 2022 and encourage those that were not successful first time around to try again using the resources we have made available to help with applications.
Bringing in so many people over a relatively short period of time while still working under Covid-19 restrictions tested our teams and challenged them to collaborate to deliver in tight timescales. We have been able to rise to that challenge and we look forward to welcoming further new colleagues during 2022.