In order to save money, the Home Office decided to take the building maintenance element of the service, which had been contracted out, and operate it on a ‘self delivery’ basis. Consequently, there was a severe shortfall in engineers on a national scale. We again appointed a dedicated Account Manager, who became involved in the recruitment drive in September 2008, and over the course of an 18 month period, we succeeded in filling all their vacancies. The positions included Heating Engineers, Electrical Engineers, Gas Engineers, AC Engineers, Administrators, Helpdesk Operators and Facilities Co-ordinators.
This was a complex assignment, but very fulfilling as the vacancies were in remote and very difficult to source locations. By using our resources, networking and extensive advertising campaigns, we managed to successfully complete this assignment in time and on budget. All candidates also had to pass SC clearance which made the assignment that more complex. However we managed to source these candidates through specific Security Cleared candidate databases, networking throughout our own internal database and using candidates that had been placed previously on other SC cleared contracts.
This assignment was the first one we totally managed that involved supplying 100% SC Cleared Contractors and we built our database of security cleared Contractors on the back of this. We have since worked on similar contracts for DEFRA, HSBC bank and various Health contracts through the Buying Solutions/GPS framework.