The ‘Whole of Wales’ is a combination of all three Fire & Rescues Services (FRS) in Wales: South Wales, North Wales and Mid-West Wales. Between them they cover approximately 21,000 sq. km. and a population of over 3 million.
The ‘Whole of Wales’ is a combination of all three Fire & Rescues Services (FRS) in Wales: South Wales, North Wales and Mid-West Wales. Between them they cover approximately 21,000 sq. km. and a population of over 3 million.
These FRS had last recruited firefighters in 2012 and were concerned about the number of applicants they would receive in their 2015 campaign. This was the first time they had run a combined campaign for all three services.
Gill Goss, project manager, responding to questions based on her experiences in using SIFT:
“Candidates registered with us online and then completed a Job Preview Questionnaire, which ensures that they understand what the role of the Firefighter is about. After this registration, three HR Personnel checked any declared unspent criminal convictions, etc., and we deselected a small number of candidates. We then invited the rest to take the online tests. All correspondence with the candidates was electronically managed by the system and the work took minutes, not hours.”
“The whole process was amazingly easy. We had a team of three people working on this for a week and we processed 6,013 applications. We saved £49,000 in staffing costs because there was no manual assessing or inputting.”
“No – the online process was the SIFT and it was developed around the Fire Service competencies and what is important to us.”
“No – and this is key for us. If we were to have used traditional methods, we would have had to bring in a large team of assessors and administrators.”
“The system is set up so that the candidate has to provide details such as an NI number which prevents duplicate applications. As the tests are not ability tests (therefore there is no obvious right answer), there is no benefit getting someone else to do it for you.”
“Yes – very easy. Once again, there was a significant time saving here and we could report bio data quickly and easily almost immediately.”
“Every time!”
The application stage is traditionally the biggest challenge on a campaign of this size involving large teams checking and shortlisting, but using the new sifting tool [SIFT™] we only needed a team of three people saving us 203 working days! The cost to process an application has gone from £8.66 to £0.36 when we look at the human resources involved! We simply can’t afford not to use SIFT going forward.
