Supporting Nord Anglia Education to drive change and expand globally

Supporting Nord Anglia Education to drive change and expand globally

Nord Anglia Education is a world class, leading premium schools organisation. Their international schools offer an inspiring place to work and an outstanding education to every student. Together, their schools educate more than 66,000 students from kindergarten through to the end of secondary school.

They are driven by one unifying philosophy: “We are ambitious for our schools, students, teachers, colleagues and communities, and we inspire every child who attends a Nord Anglia Education school to achieve more than they ever imagined possible”. Their innovative and exclusive online learning platform, Global Campus,  allows Nord Anglia students to connect, discover and interact through collaborative projects.

Nord Anglia Education and Jobtrain

In 2013, Nord Anglia acquired competitor WCL and in doing so acquired all of WCL’s schools across the USA, Middle East and Europe. Whilst operating successfully with Jobtrain for a number of years, the acquisition forced a review of systems across the two organisations.

Embarking on this new chapter, Nord Anglia expressed 3 clear goals for recruitment:

  1. One system for both companies across the globe.
  2. A seamless brand experience between the new company careers site and Jobtrain.
  3. A desire to drive more pro-active sourcing and involve the line and/or get the line doing more through the online recruitment system.

Jobtrain was formally evaluated against a number of other applicant tracking systems in the market and succeeded in being retained as the online recruitment software for the now larger organisation. It was also decided that Nord Anglia would add further functionality and rebrand the candidate facing portal of the ATS.

What were Nord Anglia’s requirements from an applicant tracking system?

Nord Anglia’s Jobtrain ATS includes the following functionality:

The implementation

We migrated Nord Anglia to their new platform, added new modules, rebranded the candidate portal, configured new processes and delivered training to client users before their busiest period in the November – traditionally the start of the recruitment period in this sector, with all recruitment for the following academic year needing to be completed by the February.

It was acknowledged that there would be challenges to meet, on both Nord Anglia’s and Jobtrain’s parts:

The factors that made implementation of the applicant tracking system successful

Strong communication between Jobtrain and Nord Anglia was key throughout, from the project planning phase through to completion. Careful and thorough planning meant work could be scheduled at times of least impact and that a programme of stakeholder communication could be delivered with confidence. Our tried and tested methodology for migrations meant it was completed without any issues.

The modular approach of the Jobtrain ATS meant the new functionality could be easily switched on simultaneous to the migration and rebranding taking place outside of business hours. This meant the migration was delivered first time without issue and with no impact on the business.

The flexible self-service configuration tools within Jobtrain also gave Nord Anglia the control to make changes and additions to data and labels without the need for technical help from Jobtrain.

Getting ‘buy-in’ and positive feedback from users

New training materials and a jointly delivered programme of online training sessions (training sessions were scheduled to take into account the various time zones) enabled the new system and its features to be easily demonstrated to all client users.

Feedback from new employees demonstrated that the Jobtrain’s user friendly layout made it easy for them to quickly learn the system and get recruiting straight away at full speed.

The new functionality along with the training has enabled both recruitment and line managers within Nord Anglia to do much more in Jobtrain. Line managers are more involved than ever before in setting up vacancies, screening, short-listing, and talent pooling.

Implementing a new way of recruiting

We also helped support a strategy by Nord Anglia’s Recruitment Manager to implement a fundamentally new way of recruiting. With all vacancy advertising periods, shortlisting and interviewing coordinated globally and culminating in a week of assessment centres meant all appointment decisions could be finalised in one go. This approach allowed for less wastage in terms of time and candidates; reduced inadvertent competition between the school for the same pipeline by coordinating and streaming candidates according to best fit; and adding strong candidates who missed out this time to talent pools for future vacancies, which is also helping to reduce timescales and sourcing costs. Feedback from both candidates and recruiters has been extremely positive meaning this model will be adopted in future.

“We’ve enjoyed a very successful partnership with Jobtrain as our ATS provider.

It made sense for us to take the opportunity benchmark other suppliers against Jobtrain when we undertook a formal tender process. We found Jobtrain to be the most logical and easy to use system we reviewed and this coupled with its scalability and excellent support service made the decision a very easy one to make. Jobtrain is already used across Europe, the Middle East and Asia and we’ve now rolled out Jobtrain across the USA and we’re very happy with the results!”

RECRUITMENT MANAGER AT NORD ANGLIA EDUCATION