ANNEX 1
THE EMPLOYMENT
SERVICE LARGE
ORGANISATIONS UNIT
1. In order to offer a more customised service
to national companies the ES, in 1997, created the Large Organisations
Unit (LOU). Its initial brief was to engage large employers in
New Deal and more widely in the Government's Welfare to Work initiatives.
Over time the LOU's role has developed and it now operates across
the full range of ES business. Essentially the LOU offers major
corporate customers of the ES a single, highly professional point
of contact for seeking to meet all of their recruitment needs.
Each such customer has allocated to them an LOU Account Manager
who will seek to agree with them a service package, tailored to
meet their individual needs and labour market circumstances. The
Account Manager who will seek to agree with them a service package,
tailored to meet their individual needs and labour market circumstances.
The Account Manager will then take a "hands on" approach
to ensuring that all the elements of the service package are delivered
by participating Jobcentres.
ASDA
The Employment Service, through the LOU, has
entered into a Service Level Agreement with Asda which gives it
exclusive rights to the 27,000 new jobs which Asda is creating
over the next five years. The SLA was piloted in the ES's East
Midlands and Eastern Region with recruitment for the Asda stores
at Sinfin and Wisbech. Under the SLA Asda has agreed to help design
and deliver job preparation courses to help people at a disadvantage
compete effectively for jobs with the company.
2. Initially the LOU targeted the UK's top
500 companies, signing New Deal agreements with over 350 with
them and with 800 of their subsidiary operating companies. In
many cases the LOU has developed joint recruitment plans and helped
to develop innovative approaches such as sector based initiatives,
and to customise and deliver job preparation training. For these
companies alone, the ES has achieved more than 440,000 job placings
and 20,000 New Deal starts in the last two years.
3. The LOU approach has subsequently been
developed further to cover a number of large and medium sized
regional employers based around a team of Account Managers based
in the Agency's regional offices.
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