Examination of Witnesses (Questions 175
- 179)
WEDNESDAY 5 JULY 2000
MS CANDY
MUNRO, MR
JONATHAN BALDREY
AND MR
WILLIAM ROE
Chairman
175. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming
to see us. We are embarking on this intriguing and fascinating
study of how we can make more vacancies into jobs and in particular
get more unemployed people into jobs. All of you are involved
in that in one way or another. I do not want to encourage all
of you to answer every question otherwise we may not get through
them but to begin with I think perhaps you had better do that.
Can you describe how your organisations operate and would you
describe your operating strategies as demand-led and, if so, why?
Then you can all deal with this in your introductory remarks:
how do you measure your performance? How do you perform on those
measures which you have set yourself? I do not mind who starts
first. Candy is in the direct line of fire, perhaps you would
like to start.
(Ms Munro) Gorbals Initiative is a local
economic development company charged with the regeneration of
an area of Glasgow that is characterised by high unemployment,
high levels of deprivation, low levels of achievement, generally
very low levels of aspiration. Our business is divided into two
sides. We have services to jobseekers and services to business.
Our strategy is very much a demand-led strategy because we are
already working with businesses in the area offering them a whole
range of support. We have relationships built up there. Recruitment
is very much presented as part of the business development services
that we offer rather than the counselling side of the services
that we offer. Our recruitment service is placed within the business
development team. Very much our approach is to start with what
the employers need and work backwards and customise training and
development programmes. Our training for work programmes are very,
very successful and we generally achieve between 70 and 90 per
cent into jobs in the programmes that we run but they tend to
be small and very customised. I think that demonstrates how national
programmes can be taken and customised, given the flexibility
that we need to do that. We run with a case load of about 400-500
clients a year. We generally see a turnover of about 600 clients
through the door. Last year we had about 400 job placements. We
are a relatively small company and we measure our performance
in terms of job entry, job retention, wage levels achieved at
entry level. We also have a whole range of soft indicators in
terms of distance travelled for people that register with us.
176. That sounds to me to be almost exactly
what the Government is looking for. There will be a question later
on that I am almost tempted to ask. Now, who wants to follow up,
Jonathan?
(Mr Baldrey) Okay. It is kind of difficult to describe
what Talent does without describing roughly where I came from
before, so if I could indulge you by talking a bit about my life.
177. Yes.
(Mr Baldrey) I call myself a professional recruiter
and I have only ever recruited in my life. I started when I was
18. I was with one of the large national recruitment agencies
advising on policy and strategic issues and then setting up quite
complex large scale recruitment initiatives. Then I was made redundant
from there and started looking at helping private recruitment
agencies, small recruitment agencies, to develop their businesses
with employers. That had always been my focus. I was dragged in
almost to working within the public sector within the field of
helping unemployed people get into jobs and that was about six
or seven years ago that I started looking at that area. I was
quite surprised, having come into that area, that there was nothing
that really seemed to talk to employers the way that private recruitment
agencies talked to employers. I was invited by one of the Training
and Enterprise Councils to set up something which was demand driven
which was employer led which was not a recruitment agency, and
that is what Talent was set up to be. Here we are talking, as
I say, seven or eight years ago. Talent operates exclusively in
London at the moment. We are just opening up some branches in
the North East but we are exclusively in London.
178. Whereabouts, can I ask?
(Mr Baldrey) In the North East of England?
179. Yes.
(Mr Baldrey) We are working on a programme with Middlesbrough
Council.
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