I love recruitment.
How many of you can say that?!
I love the whole process, I love meeting new people and I love the fact that you get a shiny new person in your office at the end, and if you find someone that likes drinking copious amounts of tea, you’re a winner my friend.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very long process, which takes a lot of your time and energy and that’s time and energy you could be spending on other things.
VONNE have been advertising charity jobs for a long time (that’s how I got my job). And it still works, lots of organisations use it to advertise their jobs and lots of job-seekers secretly look at it in work time (again, how I got my job!).
So combining my love of recruitment and the need in the sector for a bit of help, we came up with the VONNE Recruitment Support Service.
You tell us what job you want to advertise and send us the job and person specs and we do the rest;
- advertise the role on the VONNE website,
- take any enquiries from applicants,
- manage all of the applications,
- help you set up your shortlisting meeting,
- provide all the information you need to shortlist and help you arrange the interviews.
We have templates galore including the full application pack if you need it, shortlisting scoring sheets, interview question templates and schedule, and offer letters and contracts.
We also have email templates for everything from confirming receipt of an application to inviting to interview to requesting references and everything you’ll need in between.
Simon James from The Josephine and Jack Project caught wind of our new scheme and was in touch before the ink had dried on my updated job description. He needed help and fast (as we were all heading off on Christmas leave).
He came in to see us and we went through the checklist process in our Christmas jumpers (this was not essential to the process). He decided what he wanted to do and therefore what we needed to do and an hour later we had a plan of action and our checklist was complete. He breathed a small sigh of relief and then he was off on holiday.
The vacancy went live the first week in January and there was a good response.
From that point on we managed the job process but kept Simon updated regularly. All the relevant documents were stored on a secure shared system so Simon could look at everything whenever he needed to. I was on hand to help with the shortlisting process and Simon asked me to sit on the interview panel.
And I'm delighted to say that The Josephine and Jack Project have a new Administrator/Projects Officer to further the tremendous work they do supporting men and women with learning disabilities.
But don't just take my word for it...here's what Simon from The Josephine and Jack Project had to say:
"This recruitment was our first as a fairly new (and very small) charity. As such it was important to get the whole process right and for it not to swamp us in terms of responding to queries and promoting the opportunity.
Right from the start, it felt like Angela and the rest of the VONNE team were on top of it - in the inception meeting I felt they understood the importance of this to us and were very clear about what they would do and when - and they kept all their promises about that.
They kept us posted when the advert was live on their website and it was useful to have something to retweet from our Twitter account as well.
I found it particularly useful to be able to access the (already anonymised) applications via a shared drive as we went along - it just reassured me that we had applications coming in and that they were the sort of candidates we were seeking.
It was also great to have things like shortlisting scoring sheets and interview question sheets provided - that saved a lot of work!
Angela also joined us on the interview panel on the day which was really helpful as far as an independent perspective was concerned. (It's really easy to get too close to these things.)
I'd have no hesitation in recommending them to support the recruitment process - we'll definitely be using them again."
If you'd like to find out how VONNE can make a difference to your organisation get in touch with me at Angela.Goodfellow@vonne.org.uk or 0191 233 2000.
Angela Goodfellow
Office and Finance Manager