Colin Minto, Global Head of Resourcing at G4S
With 620,000 employees who work in over 110 countries, in sometimes challenging environments, making sure we have the right people for the job is crucial.
Factors such as strong business growth and the nature of organising events mean that we hire over 200,000 people a year and have a unique challenge when it comes to recruitment. This is why employing, training and retaining the best workforce is critical to our future success.
The G4S Global Careers Centre
To meet the task of recruiting such a diverse group on such a large scale we realised that we needed to harness the power of online technology and e-recruitment, and so created the G4S Global Careers Centre in late 2010. The Centre is a centralised online platform which encompasses recruitment across the company, and is the first and most comprehensive centralised recruitment network of its kind anywhere.
One of the strengths of G4S is the diversity of our workforce. We are one of the world’s largest employers and recruit positions for anything from leadership roles, to middle management and support to operational employees. Every position is equally important, and therefore recruitment is critical. Strong leadership is necessary to ensure the smooth operation and running of the business, but the ground level workers are equally crucial, and make up the lifeblood of our company. Our Global Careers Centre brings together all these roles into one place and allows complete transparency of opportunity, promoting the G4S employer brand to the widest possible internal and external job seeker audiences around the world.
Before the creation of this central hub, we had 135 different ways of recruiting online across the globe – driving approximately 40,000 unique visitors a month. With such high volumes of traffic, it was difficult to oversee this process and ensure that the right person was being selected for the right position. In addition job seekers wanting to apply for roles across different divisions or indeed countries were hampered by difficulty in communication between career centres. From a logistical perspective, all these sites required different logins, making the recruitment process even more disparate.
How the Centre facilitated the recruitment process for G4S
The Global Careers Centre has revolutionised this complicated system by bringing all activity into one central hub, but significantly, has done so without taking away from the efforts of the individual branches and countries. Technology such as Multiple Applicant Tracking System integrations enable the use of a range of different recruiting technologies in each decentralised operating business without being tied to one single global vendor, whilst still allowing interaction between the central and individual parts of the business.
Given the global nature of G4S as a business, the Global Careers Centre has been highly beneficial in advertising overseas positions and allowing job seekers opportunities. The site provides a multi-lingual, community based job board to support the 30 languages commonly used in our global operations, and is therefore non-exclusive and engaging for all candidates.
Many people do not actually realise the breadth of services covered by G4S operations, and hence the job opportunities we provide. Our roles at ground level vary from security officers, drivers, events stewards, prison custody officers and immigration officers to cash controllers and baggage handlers. Furthermore, work with G4S doesn’t have to be temporary; we believe strongly in career progression and always aim to ensure that we give our employees the support, training and encouragement they need to build a long-term career with us.
Far from merely being advantageous for those looking for work, our Careers Centre also simplifies the process for all G4S hiring managers across the world as well, by providing a single globally-searchable candidate database. Artificial intelligence and semantic matching help to effectively match candidates to relevant jobs and suggest suitable applicants to hiring managers as soon as a new role is posted, removing some of the arduous leg work traditionally associated with recruitment.
The core of the Centre
The core of the Centre is its adoption of community engagement, which helps to promote the G4S employer brand, employee value proposition and global career opportunities. Visits to the site are largely driven through search engine optimisation, online partners and social media. The centre has taken e-recruitment to a new level and we have seen a 620% rise in visits to the site since its launch in 2010.
We have created an environment where people can come, not just to seek a job, but get some additional takeaways and positives to help them in their job search. It goes without saying that finding a job is the main objective of anyone visiting the site; however our social community offers an enriched experience, allowing users access to videos, forums, groups, networking opportunities, learning and job seeker resources.
The success of our recruitment centre is important not just for the job seekers and hirers, but also for our customers, who rely on us to provide the best people across a very broad spectrum of sectors. We have seen demonstrable results since the introduction of the Global Careers Centre. Since launch we have advertised 126,000+ positions, received 1,026,000+ applications from more than 938,000+ registered candidates in 184 countries and saved £5m+ in costs due to intermediary fee avoidance, efficiency and time savings.
As the world’s second largest private employer, we are constantly working to manage the scale and global nature of operations and ensure that we use our HR expertise to provide the right talent in the right place at the right time in the appropriate volume. Our Global Careers centre has helped us to achieve these goals, simplifying the process for ourselves, our employees and our customers. People are the key to help our business to function more efficiently in the future.
