Blackburn College

The Client

Blackburn College is the largest Further Education college in Pennine Lancashire and one of the largest Higher Education providers for a college in England, offering A Levels, BTECs, bachelor’s degrees, foundation degrees, master’s degrees, HNDs, HNCs, HTQs, and apprenticeships. With more than 1,000 members of staff working across a variety of roles, it’s Blackburn with Darwen’s third biggest employer.

The Challenge

Blackburn College needed strategic support for its hard-to-fill roles and volume-hiring requirements. Filling these roles would allow the college to run more courses and provide more variety and quality to students.

The Solution

After an enlightening Recruitment Health Check, the Cummins Mellor team designed a unique recruitment strategy Blackburn College could dial up or down with their shifting needs, safe in the knowledge everything was handled by experts with a deep understanding of their organisation.

The Outcome

Our Principal Recruitment Consultant, Amy Hutcheson, works closely with Blackburn College to deliver on all of its recruitment requirements. The college benefits from a single point of contact and a strong working relationship with someone who understands the business inside-out.

Hard-to-fill roles

Using innovative and varied methods to identify high-quality candidates for those hard-to-fill roles, Amy is able to sell the benefits of working at Blackburn College to exceptional passive candidates who wouldn’t have applied for a standard job advert, introducing the college to brilliant individuals they would never have otherwise found and building talent pools to dip into for futute roles.

Volume hiring

Cummins Mellor co-ordinates the advertising for all other roles, consulting on writing job adverts to ensure they’re high quality and fully optimised to be found online, choosing relevant job boards to advertise on and negotiating rates, then directing all applications to Blackburn College’s HR team for them to manage the recruitment process from there.

This way, Blackburn College maintains a lot of control over the process and makes the most of the resources within its internal HR team, with the benefit of having the front-end part of the process managed on their behalf so they can hand-pick and hire the best candidates.

Our Managing Director, Katie, oversees this partnership at a strategic level to ensure we continue to exceed the college’s expectations.

Blackburn College said:

“Excellent working with Katie and her team, finding solutions and success to recruitment challenges. Katie’s leadership, professionalism and experience shine through. Looking forward to our continued solutions-focused working.”

The Difference

Being able to dial this service up and down depending on requirements has been a gamechanger for Blackburn College.

A traditional recruitment solution wouldn’t suit the variety and volume of vacancies, so our ability to design a completely tailored approach has changed how they hire and what they are capable of delivering to their students with the right people in place.

This is a bespoke solution combining different elements of our three recruitment packages. It began with a Recruitment Health Check, which forms part of our Recruitment Plus package, while the hard-to-fill roles fall under our Recruitment Core retained service. For volume-hiring, the college benefits from our Recruitment Lite package - a cost-effective, light-touch recruitment solution.

Need help with hiring but not sure which solution is the best fit?

Let’s start with a conversation and we’ll recommend a tailored approach for you.