The SE recruitment experience – from recruiting manager to applicant

Applying for a job seems simple enough, right? Set out your own expectations on a job and employer, find something that meets your expectation and apply! However, in the 6 months I have spent with the service design team at Scottish Enterprise (pretty new right!) I have learned that very few things are as simple as we say or think.

Following several queries and concerns relating to our Current vacancies page on Scottish-enterprise.com, the team kicked off a project to research, understand and act on the needs of our customers (potential applicants) and colleagues (those involved in recruitment).

Outcomes and Outputs

Ultimately, we are aiming to streamline our recruitment processes and make the experience positive for both recruiting managers and applicants (and everyone in-between).

Approach

To do so we have carried out several research sessions. The initial discovery research, which Linda Sutherland led, aimed to identify our most recent employees’ expectations and experience with our recruitment process.

To process the results the team setup an in-person workshop, the post-it notes, and sharpies came out and we got to work. By grouping all our insights into key areas, we were able to identify what we could improve on and summarise our results.

Following this the team proposed a newly designed Work with us landing page, a Culture and values’ page and a ‘Career starters’ page, which Katie Chambers led. Our designs were further tested by Helen McKnight through several user testing sessions. The results of these tests helped the team implement a much better structure and refine the content before moving to live.

Where are we now?

Working closely with the Human Resources (HR) team, we have now launched the new ‘Work with us’ page on the Scottish Enterprise website which marks the end of the first phase of this project.

We will continue to review the performance of the new pages and update the design appropriately (another blog post will follow up on this).

Next Steps

Phase 2 of this project will allow the team to get involved in the procurement of the HR recruitment system. Additionally, we will review and develop our internal recruitment processes alongside the HR team.