Janine Page

Said the following about Northern Recruitment Team:

“I'm nominating the Northern Recruitment Team for the Recruitment Team of the year due to their ongoing commitment and dedication to provide a first class recruitment service to our hiring managers and our candidates.

The team has grown quickly over the last year, going from recruiting for Conductors and Drivers across the business, to additionally providing a recruitment service for Engineering, Support Functions, Early Careers and the Revenue Teams. The team have welcomed, supported and developed our new team members to ensure that they have all the knowledge, training and understanding to be able to excel in their roles.

In the last 12 months we have also opened our very own in house Driver Assessment Centre, where candidates are assessed against the RSSB Driver Assessment framework. Our dedicated team of 3 trained Assessors have ensured that the Centre has been a huge success story and so far over 300 candidates have been assessed.

The team are very pro-active and are constantly thinking of better ways to do things, to improve the candidate experience and also make best use of resource. They have built strong and trusted working relationships with our hiring managers and are a highly respected team. They have also risen to the challenge of recruiting in the current post-covid climate and have implemented various initiatives to ensure roles at Northern stand out from the crowd and that the process is as streamlined as possible for candidates.

Some highlights include:

- 97% of operational training course places filled so far in 2022, which has been a very challenging climate (169 out of 175 places)

- Achieving an average time to hire for management roles of 50.4 days

- Embedding the 'blind' sifting process, supporting our EDI strategy

- Delivering Interview Skills workshops to Line Managers

- Successful delivery of our early careers intake for 2022 - including Engineering Apprentices, Non-Engineering Apprentices, Graduates and Year In Industry students

- Process improvement workshops

- Processed over 18500 job applications so far this year

- Have made nearly 600 job offers

Some of the team's anecdotal feedback:

- 'I would like to thank you for your instruction the other day, the interviews were a success and I was less nervous going into them, which made a positive impact on the flow of the interviews for the people being interviewed.'

- 'I would also like to express my gratitude to Malgorzata, she has been amazing throughout this whole process – she is still messaging me on Teams at this hour on a Friday with advice even though I told her it would keep until Monday; that is true dedication. Can you please let her know that she is an amazing asset to the department and company and that I appreciate all the help that she has given me'

- 'I’ve just had an email saying I’ve passed my MMI and just wanted to say thank you so much for the support you provided throughout the day (especially when my glasses broke!) and for making me feel at ease during the interview.'

- 'Just wanted to say a massive thank you for all your help with this. You’ve been brill '

- 'Unfortunately this morning didn't go as well as I was hoping for. I do apologise for my failings. Mel the lady taking the course was absolutely fantastic. I just didn't hit the bench mark required.'

I could not ask for a more dedicated and supportive team - they are all a credit to Northern.“