CIO Bulletin

Keystone Employment Group specializes in online recruitment and Talent Bank solutions

AWS cloud platform provides several benefits to the business. It ensures the security and reliability of business data with very high-end security configuration and networks. AWS provides out of the box feature for resource back up and scalability.

Talent Bank is hosted in the cloud with Amazon Web Services, meaning your pool of talent is available safely and securely 24/7 in an ISO207001 compliant environment. With Talent Bank, you have a 24/7 recruitment service available anywhere in the world on any device.

In conversation with Malcolm Paice, Managing Director, to know the journey and transformation of the company

Q. Why did you choose this arena of business? Do you regret taking this decision or are you happy to be a game changer?

Keystone actually started out building a technical solution for its own internal business. 10 years ago our company was more of a traditional recruitment firm, placing employees in temporary and permanent roles across a wide range of clients. The management of temporary workers used to be a resource heavy operation, with timesheets and payment of workers taking a lot of manual effort, so we built the software to automate the onboarding, timesheets and payments of thousands of temporary workers and then found, almost by chance, that this was exactly the solution what a lot of organisations needed. Talent Bank was born and quite quickly we saw that universities in particular were crying out for this solution and when they adopted Talent Bank and moved away from traditional recruitment agencies, it was the game changer moment.

Q. How competent is Keystone in the market?

We believe in doing few things and doing them well. Competence and assurance is more important than growth for its own sake. We have gained a strong reputation for delivering to our clients a solution that has been tailored to fit their exact needs and over the past 5 years we have continually invested into our technology stack to make sure we are always offering new functions, features, convenience and security. Being competent is vital when your clients are in the public sector and we have proved our competence with certifications in ISO27001 Information Security and ISO9001 Quality Management.

Q. What are the top strategies according to you to grow a brand?

Firstly, it’s knowing what you want the business to be and how to make it clear what the business does do and what it doesn’t do. It’s easy to get distracted and knocked off course, but if you know what you want the product or service to be and focus on that it will be easier to convey that to the people you need to market your brand to. The longer it takes for you to explain what your business is and what your services are, the more likely it will be a harder sell to clients. Secondly, I’d say your people strategy has to be right- hire the person and teach the job. We want our customers to know they can trust us, so that means hiring people who are implicitly trustworthy first and foremost. That is a key factor in building a brand people trust.

Q. How do you help aspiring people to start a business of their own?

I have done a bit of mentoring, helping people with start up businesses to avoid some common mistakes and helping them to focus on the right areas. For example, spending more time hiring a good person rather than spending 12 months on logos and branding. Often mentoring ends up helping new business founders with the really mundane stuff they never think of when the first exciting months of starting a company kick in. People often overlook some of the dull but essential factors you have to take care of when running a business.

Q. How do you help your customers fall in the right place with strategic planning?

We always like to really draw on the experience we have had with other clients to help our customers. In the public sector our customers get an assurance by knowing we have been through similar planning and implementations with other, comparable organisations. We have enough experience now that we can really help our customers see what the best practices are and to plan ahead to accommodate changes in the market, changes in human behavior and expectations and likely regulatory changes. Employment patterns and trends are driven by so many external factors and we have seen most scenarios come and go, so now our experience is really mature and meaningful and we always offer it out to our customers. We have helped steer them through some really tough times and into some really good times, they know we are a partner more than a supplier of services.

Q. How does Talent Bank ease recruiting process by pulling in the right candidates at the right time?

The beauty of Talent Bank is it’s immediacy in accessing and hiring staff 24/7. There is a large pool of workers available and you can find them and offer them a job in just 3 clicks. We have spent time building intelligent ‘Groups’ and ‘Families’ of workers across every imaginable skill set and our clients can even build new groups on-the- fly for specific mini-pools of workers. This means that when a requirement for a worker crops up- whether it is one worker for 5 hours or 100 workers for 40 hours, you can find them in seconds.

Q. How is Talent Bank an asset to universities, Procurement for housing and public sector?

For universities it gives these large institutions a single platform for all their temporary and permanent recruitment as well as a student employability solution all in one portal. Being able to offer students the opportunity to earn while they learn is crucial in modern higher education, and Talent Bank makes that frictionless, simple and highly data driven. With Procurement for Housing we become an asset by allowing those organisations in the housing sector to stop using slow and anachronistic recruitment agencies with fees that are really out of kilter in this day and age. The housing sector often has acute shortages of staff in certain skill sets, so speed is vital in finding and hiring people to fill the gaps. In the wider public sector, it is really the healthcare sector that has so much to gain from Talent Bank. The amount of money wasted in the UK on agency staffing in the NHS, our largest single employer, is staggering and in the post COVID 19 environment, re-channeling those funds to frontline services is essential.

Q. How do you improve staff retention?

Talent Bank achieves this by allowing workers and their employers to chain together current and forthcoming work assignments in a way an agency never could. Recruitment agencies are always looking to maximize their fees by moving workers about in roles that suit the agent, whereas increasingly workers want stability and consistency. Because an employer is able to line up another work assignment that begins when the worker is completing their current assignment, the worker is retained directly in the talent pool and other hiring managers can view their experience and availability. For contingent workers it is the best possible blend of flexibility and certainty.

Malcolm Paice, Managing Director

“With a simple online search facility workers can be hired in seconds and with all compliance, timesheets and payroll facilities in one place, it’s never been easier to manage your temporary workforce.”