Case Study: Partnership-led Recruitment Support

The East Thames Housing Group specifically required high volumes of staff including Gas Engineers, Labourers, Planners, Surveyors and Operational Managers. These roles were essential for supporting planned and responsive maintenance, estate services, cyclical works, refurbishment, and voids covering 13,500 households and corporate buildings.

We were pleased to be awarded Master Vendor status for the provision of all temporary workers across Hard FM, technical/engineering, site services & trades and professionals. The award came after several years of us being a preferred supplier.

We worked closely with Interserve FM’s community of hiring managers to ensure frequent engagement, regular site visits and promotion of the contract. Our solution included fixed agency fees, single invoicing, and full visibility of spend - all of which provided our client with a more simple, efficient, and transparent service.

Our deep understanding of both recruitment and our client’s needs resulted in us supplying in excess of 300 workers a day (at a peak) for the East Thames Housing Group. This activity culminated in a revenue of more than £10m per annum and to date, we have managed over 1.5m hours of timesheets across 300+ projects.

This success has led to an annual cost saving of circa 7% - the result of rate reduction and annual rebates. We estimate that our process efficiencies have brought about a reduced ‘time to hire’ which has saved an additional 2% for our client.

For The London Ambulance Service contract, increased assistance was required during the COVID-19 pandemic. A surge of more than 11,000 daily calls was being received in April 2020 - that equated to a rise of 40% on typical monthly call volumes. Cleaning requirements also intensified due to suspected COVID-19 cases being transported via the ambulance service to hospitals (including Nightingale hospitals) during that time.

To support this, Carbon60 pulled together a team in a short timescale to provide 24/7 assistance on sourcing and hiring a broad range of roles. We managed to do this by mobilising five key recruiters from other projects to carry out the screening/vetting, video interviewing and subsequent onboarding of the most suitable candidates. The team worked on a shift basis to ensure we met Interserve FM’s tight deadlines.

This initiative resulted in us filling 170 roles within our first week on this project. 112 hires started on the Easter Bank holiday weekend and at the peak, we had a workforce of 343 individuals in place to help with the COVID-19 emergency efforts.

We generated 500 candidates during week one, by launching the Key Work Network - a scheme to help those looking for work (and in particular, furloughed workers) from other sectors to find roles to support during the crisis. A large proportion of people who found work through this program have gone on to become permanent staff members on the project they were placed.