Preparation is key

With the recent news from Glassdoor that Bromford has been rated the third best place to work in the UK, what better time to join us? As you might have noticed, we’re on a bit of a recruitment drive at the moment which is partly due to all the activity around the introduction of neighbourhood coaches, and our business transformation programme that is due to last for around five years.

We’ve recently decided to do things a little differently and test out some new ways of attracting the most talented candidates when recruiting for new colleagues. An example of this was our drive to fill crucial customer service advisor posts where we pushed the vacancies out across job boards and Bromford’s social media channels to reach as many candidates as possible - this proved really successful, with more than 400 applications landing in our inbox.

From this point we invited all applicants to engage with us on Twitter, asking them to read through our DNA and tell us which of the Be’s (Good, Brave, Different or Commercial) best represented them and how they would bring this alive in the role. This wasn’t a prerequisite but, as we were looking for people with some experience of working with social media, we wanted to gauge the appetite for it and use some of the responses to fuel conversations during the interview stages. Here are a few examples of the tweets we received:

On Monday 6 November we welcomed nine new colleagues into our customer service centre, all as a direct result of this recruitment campaign. And all nine were offered in the first round of interviews which is brilliant as we’d typically go to a least one more stage of interviews.

All of the successful candidates had obviously done their research. They came prepared, were engaged and welcomed questions as much as they were keen to ask some of their own. These were people who were investing as much time into us as we were into them – truly informed candidates.

And this is something we wanted to highlight to anybody who may be considering applying for a vacancy with us at the moment. If you’ve seen a job that you’re considering applying for, please consider these couple of things before you do so:

• Preparation is key! You need to do your research and come along ready to share your experience and skills with us, bringing to life who you are and what you can do.

• It’s so important to ensure that you create a suitable CV detailing all of your experience and skills, so that you don’t miss out when the applications are being shortlisted. The applications will be screened by recruiters and line managers and they will be looking for evidence that you are able to do the job, on this basis alone the applications are shortlisted.

As you can see from the couple of examples below it looks like we’re getting closer to perfecting our recruitment process with candidates really enjoying the whole experience, but we’re always learning and would love you to help us.

Customer Services Manager, Claire Havenhead, had this to say: “Ultimately sharing our culture through this new recruitment process has meant that we engaged potential colleagues very early on. The nine new colleagues that joined us just over a month ago have added to the warmth and spirit of our customer service centre instantly. They get what we are about and are excited to be here, so much so that these guys are already telling their friends. They want them to enjoy the same environment they are already a part of.”

For Bromford colleagues reading this, thank you to all of you who got involved on social media helping us to promote the recent campaign. We have around 1,200 colleagues at Bromford and we sometimes underestimate the power of what we can achieve if we all help to spread the word of what’s going on. Social media is such a powerful tool and the more we share, the wider messages go, so thank you again. And don’t forget, you could pocket yourself £300 by sharing our vacancies with family and friends and using our Recommend a Friend scheme.

If you fancy a career with Bromford (or are already with us and are looking for a new challenge), or want to know a little more about what we offer, visit our careers pages here.

You can also follow us on twitter using @BromfordJobs and if there’s a particular service area you’re interested in you can follow one of these dedicated channels: @BromTrades @BromLocalities @BromConstruct @BromCustService.