FirstPort is the UK’s leading residential property service provider, caring for 320,000 homes in England, Wales and Scotland, across 5,600 developments. With over four decades of
experience and over 4,000 employees, FirstPort works with developers, investors, freeholders and over 1,500 Resident Management Companies.
As the UK’s largest and fastest-growing property management company, FirstPort is well ahead in using digital technologies to support its people at work, including its resourcing function services.
“As the market leader and the biggest in the industry, our career and growth opportunities are the most varied you will find.”
FirstPort is on an exciting journey of growth where there is a real opportunity to make a difference and for employees to grow their careers.
Ensuring it attracts and engages the right talent at any stage in their career to join FirstPort across the group of brands is recognised as a key differentiator to making successful hires.
Rethinking the approach to recruitment
FirstPort is a long-term Eploy customer. However, after exploring if its HRIS system could deliver best-of-breed recruitment services with its recruitment module, it concluded that it hadn’t the deep functional capability required to support recruitment services and end-to-end candidate experience.
Natalie Lewis, Head of Resourcing at FirstPort, joined the company as the transition to the HR & Payroll system was underway. The scope of implementing the HRIS system included using the recruiting module for the resourcing activity at FirstPort. It soon became apparent that the solution couldn’t meet the business’ talent attraction, engagement, recruitment and onboarding needs. The HRIS recruiting module required significant manual intervention and did not provide an intuitive user experience.
Functionality gaps of using the HRIS bolt-on module
• Basic reactive job management and simple Applicant Tracking capabilities.
• Job advertising/job feeds were limited to the careers site with limited branding options.
• Did not support passive candidate engagement and talent pooling for proactive recruitment.
• Unable to automatically move candidates through the recruitment process.
• Lack of ways to communicate the employer brand and value proposition across the candidate journey.
• No reporting capability.
• No flexibility for customisation e.g. multiple recruitment process workflows.
• Lack of recruitment subject matter experts for system advice.
Recognising the impact on the level of service the resourcing team could provide without a dedicated best-of-breed Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and the negative impact on working relationships, the business wanted to utilise Eploy, redefining its requirements to future-proof resourcing.
Redefining recruitment requirements
The management team fully supported upgrading Eploy to the latest version, including Eploy Flows functionality. They recognised that Eploy’s dedicated ATS solution would address the core issues that were apparent with the recruiting module of the HRIS.
“After presenting to the business the gaps of using a bolt-on solution within the HRIS, the Stakeholders saw how we could address the core issues with Eploy and add value at every stage of the recruitment journey for hiring managers, candidates, PSL and the HR Team. It was also an opportunity to rebuild the resourcing team and demonstrate our credibility as an internal partner through the extra value we could deliver back to the business”.
Implementation Process
FirstPort Resourcing Team worked alongside Eploy’s Implementation Team to review the
existing recruitment processes in Eploy from application to onboarding. Following the review, the teams re-configured Eploy, creating and adapting workflows to the business’ specific recruitment process requirement.
“The flexibility of Eploy and agile design enables us to design workflows to deliver the best experience for differing requirements and provides ongoing flexibility to make changes as the business needs. Being able to manage our workflows internally using Eploy form flows has given us exactly what we need for now and the future. We have complete control over our Flows structure and can test these in a safe environment before activating, that doesn’t rely on external support but that we know is there should we need it.”
Eploy’s Flows Technology
Form Flows are a process or journey a candidate follows to provide the required hiring
information. Flows encompass application processes, gathering the candidates’ history
and experience, and onboarding processes, capturing all of your new starter information.
Eploy customers can configure their Flows to occur during any stage of their recruitment
process. You are not limited to gathering information at the application or onboarding
stage - and can even set up Flows to trigger following a successful interview, for example.
Flows can include conditions so that the information you gather is specific to the type
of candidate or vacancy. So, you can ensure that you capture all relevant information
for different departments, business areas, or functions within your organisation.
Recruitment success
FirstPort can now easily advertise vacancies using Eploy’s complete Indeed integration. Job listings automatically appear on Indeed, making it easy for candidates to apply directly with all applicants appearing in Eploy. FirstPort also uses Eploy multiposting to post vacancies to preferred job boards.
The candidate journey has been improved to create an engaging experience, more in line
with current candidate expectations, using the Eploy Candidate Portal. Candidates visiting the
careers site can search for vacancies across the Group brands by keywords or location and apply with an effortless registration process, using social network profiles to reduce rekeying.
The candidate experience continues through the offers and onboarding process, which is now automated with Eploy’s Onboarding module to bring new colleagues on board seamlessly,
accelerating the onboarding process and managing offer acceptance online rather than manually.
The reporting dashboards within Eploy provide in-depth reporting as standard to measure all aspects of the recruitment process with customisable dashboards for any scenario. With Eploy’s Dashboards technology, FirstPort has eliminated the need for spreadsheet reporting.
Eploy is integrated with iTRENT, using Eploy’s RESTful API to export new starters into iTRENT,
populating HR and Payroll data and updating the Company Structure in Eploy, removing the need for any manual data entry. The combined solution now enables the business to harness the strengths of a dedicated ATS and feed new employee data straight into the HRIS and Payroll platform.
“The response from the business is incredibly positive. Having a fit-for-purpose recruitment
platform that is intuitive to use fosters engagement and has refreshed our purpose as a
resourcing team. We felt the pain of making do with a bolt-on HRIS solution and now have the
autonomy to continually improve our services, internally and externally and respond to needs
quickly in a fast-paced candidate market.
“Eploy has given us time back with process efficiencies through increased automation,
significantly reduced administration, manual interventions, and workarounds while positioning
our brand throughout the recruitment process. Not only that but the perception of the
resourcing team’s services and the value we deliver back to the business is understood”.
Natalie Lewis, Head of Resourcing at FirstPort