Recruitment Consultant – Client Services Executive

Location: Newcastle
Length of contract: Full time and permanent
Hours: 37.5 hours per week, Monday to Friday. To be worked between 8am and 6pm (inc 30-minute unpaid lunchbreak)
Pay Scale: £28,000 – £36,000 per annum
Holiday entitlement: Paid holiday entitlement of 28 days, plus 8 bank holidays (both calculated pro rata for part time employees). Plus a day’s leave on your birthday, plus a wellbeing day’s leave (not calculated pro rata).
Responsible to: Director

To place ex-offender candidates into sustainable paid employment with local employers.

Changing lives through recruiting with conviction(s).

• Expectant hope – we believe in the change we want to see
• Resilience – we stay the distance
• Relationship-led – we focus on people not programmes
• Collaboration – we thrive through supporting each other in team and by partnership
• Christian values – compassion in action, integrity, second chances, faith

There are three main areas of work, all of which are vital to our achieving the key positive outcome for the individuals we support – sustained meaningful employment. These three are:

1. Job finder support: interviewing ex-offenders, offering one-to-one job coaching to get them into work, with ongoing mentoring for first 12-months in employment.

Ours is a face-to-face, holistic and wraparound service that culminates in our candidates finding good jobs that last, with a wide array of socially inclusive employers on our books. Our job finder support can begin in custody and continue through the gate into community, or start here; typically, we will work with a person from anything between 1-3 months to establish ‘work readiness’, and will support them for up to a year once they find work. Many people stay in touch and come back to us for their second or third job, over a period of years, and we consider that our door is always open to them, for as long as is needed. You will:

• Conduct 1:2:1 assessments with job seeking candidates and using your professional judgement, accept them directly into our paid-work search services, or if substance misuse or homelessness are still an issue, refer them onwards for pre-employability support with partner organisations
• Work with candidates over several weeks and months as a job mentor, meeting regularly to assist in all aspects of their job search
• Help craft a good CV and disclosure letter, ensuring they understand the facts and disclosure obligations around their spent/unspent conviction(s)
• Check they have the correct right-to-work ID, order replacement birth certificates and NI letters where needed
• Book onto any relevant training courses with 3rd party training providers (CSCS card, HGV driver training, renewal energy qualifications etc)
• Encourage your candidates’ own job search activities, including teaching them how to do this via online jobs boards, and complete online application forms alongside them
• Submit your candidates to jobs we have on our books via our bank of inclusive partner employers, and pro-actively seek out other vacancies for them, to send them out ‘on spec’ to prospective employers
• Organise job interviews, making sure the candidate has the financial means to get there by public transport and has appropriate interview wear (we can provide these where needed)
• Follow-up with the candidate immediately after the interview, managing expectations and reactions if they are unsuccessful, helping to restore confidence for the “next time”
• Where successful, confirm a job start with both parties, ensuring the candidate has any future workwear and travel-to-work costs (we can provide these where needed)
• Offer any additional ‘helps’ as needed: food parcels, hygiene packs, pre loaded SIM cards, clothing, utility top ups…

2. ‘New employers’ engagement: expanding our network of employers to generate a regular flow of job opportunities, to allow us to place our candidates into work.

This will require new business development and excellent ongoing relationship management. You will identify which jobs are most sought after by our ‘typical’ candidates, and which ones are more ‘one off’s; equally you will gravitate towards employers who show themselves to be agile and responsive in their hiring processes – your client contacts are more likely to be business owners, divisional managers, site supervisors etc, rather than social value or EDI teams. You will:

• Proactively approach local employers who are advertising paid jobs that could suit current candidates on our books – eg via online searching using keywords for skills and industry
• sector – send over your candidate’s details with the goal of obtaining the recruitment instructions for the vacancy and to get them an interview
• Speculatively approach firms who are not visibly hiring right now, but who would be likely to have vacancies in the future that will match the typical skillsets of our candidates
• Maintain a “follow-up” database of active and prospective clients. Take ownership for vertical segments or geographies, in consultation with your team of colleagues to avoid duplication and to maximise our reach
• Seek to visit these employers to explain our services and answer any questions around “protocols” for interviewing or hiring ex-offenders, as well as to gain a good insight into the premises, working environment, travel routes etc
• Select and submit candidates who you consider suitable for the role, advocating for each person based on your knowledge of them, their work/volunteering references, what you have witnessed to be positive in their efforts and life changes. Be prepared to positively “push back” and even contradict an employer, if you consider any reluctance to be unfounded
• Disclose the candidate’s offending history and risk profile, emphasising their personal attributes and work strengths. Guide the employer through the interview and hiring process in close consultation with the candidate (who may be inexperienced in such a situation)

3. In-work support for up to one year: once people begin jobs, helping them sustain in post is a key part of the journey

There can often be unforeseen challenges facing our newly employed candidates – especially the recent prison leavers – be they practical (finance, debt, housing…), emotional (mental health and relationship breakdowns) and/or lifestyle (drugs and alcohol relapses). The best chance of being able to step in and advocate for the candidate and to save the job start, is through having already built relationships of honesty and confidence with them and their employer. Our in-work support lasts for up to a year; in practice our door is always open. You will:

• Advise the employer on how to successfully “on board” the new employee in their first few unfamiliar weeks and months on the job. Make them aware of any extra support needs they should consider (ie the candidate is transitioning from a hostel to private accommodation which might bring hiccups, they have medical/probation appointments that they must keep to, etc)
• Be aware of and navigate ahead of time any negative press reporting about the candidate’s past offending, potentially advising on the use of a pen name at work in tricker situations, to protect their privacy and/or the employer’s reputation
• Remain in regular contact with the candidate in their first 12 months in employment, with check-in phone calls and meetings, to help a smooth and sustained transition into employment
• Record all candidate and employer interactions and reporting outcomes on our “Itris” recruitment CRM database

This is a non-exhaustive list of tasks and may be amended from time to time in line with the needs of the charity.