Article published on: 7/02/22
Background:
Yorkshire Education is a well-established, successful education agency that provides both temporary supply and permanent staffing solutions. The business has been operational for nearly 8 years and built an excellent reputation for service across much of Yorkshire.
The provision of temporary supply staff into schools in the area is a key part of the agency’s business and to ensure that this happens easily and efficiently, Yorkshire Education has been using Flo’s primary recruitment software package for over 4 years.
A vital element in both the processes of the agency and the demands of the education sector is the management of compliance. The education sector is a highly regulated area, so it is critical that the staff supplied by Yorkshire Education to the schools they service are fully compliant in terms of qualifications, safeguarding, DBS checks, work history and references.
The Compliance element of Flo’s recruitment software system delivers 2 critical checks. The first is matching up the compliance demands of each school with the right candidates. Put simply, the candidates can only be allocated to a teaching position in a school if they have the right compliance certifications and they are all up to date. The second check is carried out by the system against the expiry dates for these certificates. The expiry dates of every compliance item are actively monitored and, when trigger dates are reached, notifications are sent to the agency’s task bar to alert them that updates are required.
Challenge:
With all systems, sometimes things don’t work quite as they should. With Flo, the generation of notifications became an issue, and this caused some challenges for Yorkshire Education as it then relied on a more manual process to generate listings of compliance expiry dates.
Whilst the information was still readily available and easily accessible in Flo, this was something we wanted to correct as the benefit of passive notifications for compliance items in a busy work environment was very apparent.
Solution:
To address the issue, it would have been easy for the Flo Team to work in isolation to fix the notifications. However, for us, it made far more sense to work closely with Yorkshire Education to understand how they were using it day-to-day and what elements were important to them.
As the Flo system offers 4 separate date triggers, we needed a feedback loop to test the updates being made. Working with Olivia and Amelia at Yorkshire Education allowed us to do that. Changes would be made, tested, and released, and then tested further in a practical environment by Yorkshire Education.
The key here was to take the feedback from Olivia and Amelia and work this into the maintenance and development plan within Flo. The email and call trail between Flo and Yorkshire Education was significant but this is what enabled us to ensure that the end product was able to meet the day-to-day demands of a working agency. At the time of writing, there is one more release to do to complete this work.
We often think of teamwork as being something internal, but that is not always the case. Flo and Yorkshire Education formed a great team to resolve an issue that will benefit not only Yorkshire Education, but all the other agencies working with Flo as well. The willingness of Olivia and Amelia to help find the answers to a challenging problem is not underestimated by Flo and supports a template of working with other clients on future development and improvements of the Flo system.
