As a large organisation based in North West England, Lancashire Constabulary employs over 5000 members of staff and officers, including a growing number of Special Constabulary Officers, Police Cadets, and Community Volunteers.
Something we are incredibly proud of as an organisation is our commitment to recruiting a diverse workforce. In recognition of our continued dedication to workplace diversity, we were recently ranked 4th in The Inclusive Top 50 UK Employers List.
In order to achieve this, the recruitment team at Lancashire Constabulary has developed and delivered high-impact initiatives to actively implement solutions. Earlier in 2020, we went live with the govDelivery email communications platform from Granicus, to help further boost our employee recruitment efforts.
The cloud-based integrated communications platform is used primarily by government organisations to communicate with citizens on important issues and services, however, at Lancashire we are using the advanced features of our platform in a completely unique way – to drive recruitment.
We do this by harnessing the flexibility of the low code platform to create job alerts that notify interested applicants of a range of available roles within the force, and target them via email with valuable, action-oriented information about working at the organisation.
This technology will support all recruitment drives at Lancashire Police, which has been given the opportunity to employ hundreds of police officers along with other police staff roles, as part of the nationwide national police uplift programme. Essentially it will keep potential applicants up to date and informed on job opportunities and application progress.
Lancashire Police began implementing govDelivery in March 2020 and it was complete and in full use by the force by August. We were up and running in under five months, even with the pandemic. The platform is easy to use and very intuitive and thanks to this it has already become integral to the recruitment process in a very short space of time.
We aim to attract new talent using innovative techniques. One approach has been to use the relationships our neighbourhood officers have with members of the community to find prospective candidates who might make a good addition to the force.
When our officers are on duty, they carry around postcards with recruitment information. If on their journey they have a conversation with a member of the community who showcases any of the skills needed to be an outstanding member of the force, they can ask if they have an interest in joining and hand them a card.
These cards feature a QR code, and if the person is interested in taking the conversation further, they can scan the code which takes the user to a sign-up page on the recruitment website powered by the platform. This page encourages the prospective candidate to input their details and access the email campaign about careers with Lancashire Police.
Using govDelivery gives the force the opportunity to fully manage all of its communications from one place. The recruitment campaign is led by marketing and HR, and one of the reasons we chose the platform was due to its ability to capture data that enables effective targeting of applicants with relevant information. This new capability represents an advance for Lancashire Police, as it was unable to offer tailored sign-up job alerts for potential applicants in the past.
We also use it to keep recent applicants engaged, as the process from filling in the application form to becoming a police officer can take up to 12 months. Through the platform, Lancashire Police can target these individuals with relevant information and updates at each step of the way on their journey to joining the force.
We not only saw govDelivery as a great platform to fully manage all of our recruitment communications, but we also chose it because it allows for strong use of multi-media as well. It really allows us to create engaging content, including striking visuals and video, which now in the digital age play a crucial role in bringing job adverts to life.
We’ve already seen an improvement in our recruitment service interaction rates – in fact, we’ve had just over 7000 people sign up for job alerts since implementing the platform. This is what continues to encourage us to think of creative ways that we can use our email platform to attract interest.
The success of this channel shift and this level of engagement with the content is exactly why our next step going forwards is to look at fully rolling out govDelivery across Lancashire, in order to explore how widely the platform can support other areas of our organisation, including internal communications across our full workforce.
