CIO Bulletin

Keystone Talent Bank — providing organizations with a complete suite of online tools for hiring and managing casual workers

The process of finding, hiring and managing staff can be a painful and resource-heavy task for some organizations, as it requires a lot of time, effort and proper process. That is why, as a result, some firms find it difficult to have enough time to do it well. HR teams can get distracted from the more important aspects of their roles by getting drawn into often unnecessarily manual tasks around sifting and shortlisting candidates, onboarding and commissioning new workers, especially in casual or temporary roles.

Once upon a time, organizations and businesses looked to recruitment agencies to lighten the load, and there was a time when that was a preferred route to accessing casual workers. But today, in the 21st Century, those agencies are equally bogged down by slow and often inaccurate search processes, adding in even more delay and frustration that is typical among third party, ‘middle-man’ business models.

So now digital solutions, which can do the heavy lifting and enable a ‘self-service’ process for finding, hiring and managing workers, are often the exact the answer that many stressed HR teams and hiring managers are looking for.

If you are looking for a digital approach to fixing this age-old problem, then Keystone Talent Bank might have the right solutions for you. The company specializes in online recruitment and Talent Bank solutions which help organizations across the UK attract and manage the very best talent. Its bespoke Talent Bank solution provides a technology platform customized to meet your talent attraction and management needs along with optional support services tailored to your requirements.

By having your own Talent Bank of flexible workers you can attract, retain and share skills, experience, and knowledge across the whole organization — from one application. Your Talent Bank is continually fed with free job advertising and social media channels.

In conversation with Malcolm Paice, Managing Director of Keystone

Q. What makes Keystone Talent Bank one of the leading providers of online workforce and talent solutions in the UK? Give us some insights about the company’s service offerings.

Keystone Talent Bank has established itself as one of the most flexible and configurable workforce management solutions in the marketplace and that is supported by a true partnership approach with our clients. We have found, particularly in the UK, that the public sector has often had a bad experience deploying new technology solutions that are designed to be all things to all people but are often inflexible and expensive, and/or slow to adapt. The reality of workforce management software is that rarely are any two clients the same - especially in the public sector where we have thrived. Because clients’ needs differ, your software needs to be readily configurable and adaptable to different use cases. Where we have a client managing 1,000 social care workers, their needs are going to be different from a university managing 3,000 teaching staff.

Whilst the core solution of being able to offer work assignments to workers and pay them for it may be common, many other things need to be flexible: managing rates of pay, cost centers, spending, and compliance controls, business rules- these can (and do) all vary from one client to the next. Because Talent Bank has proven itself to be flexible and customizable and we work closely with our customers throughout their journey to digitizing workforce management, it is a great model of continuous improvement, which means our clients gain ongoing, tangible improvements to processes and cost efficiencies. At its heart, we are offering our customers the means to find and hire workers across any discipline, with automated controls around pay, working hours, and compliance, and with electronic timesheeting and payroll options to make the managing of high numbers of casual/occasional staff far easier and much lower cost.

Q. Tell us about your Talent Bank platform. How does it help your clients in hiring and managing casual workers?

First and foremost - as the name suggests - we provide the client with their bank of workers. All workers create a profile that is the basis for all their job offers and enables them to be found in seconds by the hiring managers. What is traditionally a laborious process of posting job ads, receiving applications, shortlisting, and offering is condensed down to a three-click-find and select process. The system makes further light work of the hiring process by digitizing the process of identity checking and worker compliance through to workers submitting their timesheets online with a full range of pay and hours controls as per the client’s business rules. So, in short, Talent Bank makes hiring casual workers faster, less prone to error, less manual, and more data-driven, saving time and cost across the whole estate of occasional workers.

Q. How do you secure candidates’ data? Has the company committed to strong technical data security practices?

Talent Bank is fully certified to ISO27001 Information Security Management standard and we are also Cyber Essentials certified- a recognized data security standard favored by public sector clients. We fully utilize all the security features of the world-class AWS hosting environment and continually enhance and improve our protection and data encryption standards.

Q. Can you provide us with one or two success stories describing the challenges your clients faced and how your solutions helped them overcome those challenges?

As a solutions business, our day-to-day focus is on fixing problems a client may have. One recent example was an existing client who wanted a more visual means of managing the various shifts they have active at any one time.

In tackling that largely cosmetic change we took the opportunity to develop the way shifts are offered to and interacted with by workers to make it more intuitive and in turn, this helped to make the visual user experience that much better. So what we delivered was more than the client was expecting, and that’s always a nice way of delivering improvements.

Another recent example is our integration with third-party identity verification solutions, as a number of our clients are moving these entirely online, following changes in UK legislation making it easier to support online ID checks. When it comes to such third-party solutions, we like to take an agnostic approach, so our customers can select whichever ID verification solution best suits their needs and we will then integrate with that.

In this instance, it means a worker’s ID checks can be automatically uploaded into Talent Bank and managed from there going forward. This piece of work has led us to some nice integration with digital identity verification solutions which are making it easier for our clients to capitalize on the more frictionless way of handling worker compliance that the new legislation has brought about, whilst still affording the client flexibility on which ID solution provider they utilize.

Q. What does the road ahead look like for Keystone Talent Bank? Do you have anything new coming up?

I think the solution we have just built specifically for occasional teaching staff is a game changer. Historically, in terms of workforce management in a university, these roles are the hardest to process without incurring a lot of time and labor costs, because teaching roles, particularly Graduate Teaching Assistant roles have complex business rules behind them. For us, digitizing that process and removing the manual effort and risk of error has provided a solution that universities will find a bit of a game-changer, as it radically improves how they can manage those occasional teaching staff.

Helping organizations recruit better performers through digital solutions

Malcolm Paice is the Managing Director of Keystone Talent Bank. He is a proven business leader with a solid track record in ensuring businesses make the most of their people, products, and technology to deliver customer success, growth, and profitability.