Centralising recruitment services for NICE through NHS Midlands and Lancashire significantly improved efficiency, reducing time-to-hire to under 30 days, enhancing resilience, and enabling strategic focus, ultimately streamlining processes and elevating service standards.

Background​

We were approached directly by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to review their in-house recruitment service. The evaluation revealed that a centralisation of services to the NHS Midlands and Lancashire (NHS ML) could significantly improve the recruitment function and the technology solutions underpinning it. We provided a restructuring proposal where a central team at NHS ML would deliver end-to-end standardised recruitment while a local lead at NICE could focus on improvement projects and organisational strategy

Action​

The organisational headcount supported by recruitment at NICE was 644 employees with a turnover of 9.7%. A comprehensive mobilisation plan, leading to service transition and implementation included:

• Understand and map out current processes together with recruitment, HR and project leads 
• Highlight roles and responsibilities following merger with NHS ML recruitment service 
• Identify areas that could be streamlined using NHS ML technologies and processes  
• A sample communication strategy 
• Complete Data Processing Impact Assessment 
• Create bespoke email, offer and contract templates. Templates have the functionality to add multiple supporting documents which helps to provide guidance and applicant engagement 
• Implement the Trac recruitment system to improve time to hire and streamline the process  
• Bespoke Trac training sessions for individual departments – finance, HR and recruitment, hiring managers. 

Day-to-day transactional processes transferred to NHS ML where our capacity and technology allowed us to complete them in the most efficient way. Higher level targeted strategy development was based at NICE where local expertise was most effective.

Impact

In the first year, we advertised and processed 215 vacancies for NICE. The pace of recruitment increased by speeding up the transactional processes. All recruitment key performance indicators were surpassed including less than 30 days of time to hire from vacancy created to conditional or unconditional offer (see Fig.1 – the last column is actual days).

The integration of services into a central recruitment team at NHS ML, combined with a local place-based lead at NICE, allowed further efficiencies to be realised:

• Enhanced resilience with the ability to flex capacity to meet organisational demand 
• Access to shared learning such as improvement project outcomes and communications 
• Releasing internal capacity for the customer to concentrate on strategy and defining organisational needs 
• Flexibility and agility – adapted standardised process as necessary to meet local requirements 
• Improved information governance and reporting capability through better use of technology and skilled staff 
• Doing things once – for example, legislative updates are consistent throughout organisations and allow for faster implementation of new policies  
• Sharing best practice through networking and collective knowledge 
• Improved business continuity by transferring responsibilities to the central team in case of leave, sickness and incidents. 

Adopting the Trac technology automated many elements of the process making it more efficient and elevating the service standards:

• Supporting organisations with establishment control by only allowing managers to allocate the approved FTE to applicants that are conditionally offered 
• A pre-employment checklist which can be adapted 
• Built-in governance based on NHS and Home Office standards 
• Progress tracking making recruitment activity easier to report  
• Better communication and engagement with hiring managers and applicants 
• Integration with other systems, particularly e-DBS (e-Bulk) and jobs.nhs.uk 
• Automatically sending, returning and chasing references. 

NICE confirmed that the transition of the service was seamless. Minimal changes to processes and documents were needed, and our support has been extended to 2023.

We have also been asked to support on a 6-month trial basis the recruitment for members of the NICE Committee.

For more information

For more information and to learn how we can help you with your recruitment, please contact us.