Understand your current ESR usage to identify areas for increasing productivity and efficiency within your recruitment service.

1. Do I understand my organisation’s full end to end recruitment process?
2. Is our financial ledger reconciled with ESR?
3. Have we asked our applicants about their experience of our recruitment process?
4. Does the Recruitment Team(s) run the Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) process at both the pre hire and hire stage?
5. Do we have a robust process in place to ensure the running of the IAT Portable Data Set copy at hire stage?
6. Do we request and respond to ESR standard references?
7. Are we actively involved in regional or national Streamlining and are we working towards the recommendations and deliverables?
8. Do we actively promote access to ESR Self Service during recruitment campaigns, so as to attract potential applicants?
9. Do we give our applicant’s access to Self Service to undertake any e-Learning prior to their start date?

Understanding your recruitment function within the wider organisation landscape, will help to ensure you deliver a responsive and effective recruitment service not only for today, but also for the future.

1. What are the organisation challenges we face in delivering an effective recruitment service?
2. Do our corporate teams meet on a regular basis to understand system and process interdependencies and address impacts appropriately?
3. Have we aligned our recruitment activities and organisation Induction in line with the national streamlining programme activity and expectations?
4. Are we aligning our service with national expectations?
5. Are our corporate teams aware of ESR system developments?
6. Within our local Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STP) have we evaluated ESR against the STP plans for future workforce models in our region?

To help you formulate a clear plan of action for maximising your use of ESR, we recommend you initiate the following:

Arrange a meeting with your Recruitment / Medical Staffing / Learning and Development / Occupational Health Lead.

Key questions:

1. Do we have a written end-to-end robust recruitment process that is followed in practice?
2. Do we follow the Streamlining Recruitment ‘Perfect Process’?
3. How do the separate teams work together to ensure a seamless recruitment process?
4. Are we realising the maximum benefits from ESR in the recruitment process?
5. Is there further functionality to use?
6. Do our back office teams have all the relevant ESR system knowledge to maximise its capability?
7. Have we assigned all of the relevant employees to the ESR system notification roles?

Arrange a meeting with your Assistant HR Director/Head of Workforce/ESR Lead:

Key questions:

1. What is our vision for the recruitment service we provide and how does ESR support this vision?
2. How are we evaluating our recruitment process for an organisational, appointing manager and applicant perspective?
3. Do we use the various national recruitment dashboards and reports in Business Intelligence to fully understand our recruitment trends, agency costs etc.?
4. Have we looked at how the use of ESR can help to reduce costs and administrative effort?
5. Are there barriers to us using ESR more effectively and if so, are we engaging the NHS ESR Programme Team to discuss / resolve them?
6. Does our induction process focus on an introduction to our organisation and our key values, rather than completing training and forms?
7. What is covered within the local inductions delivered by department managers? Is it effective? Is there opportunity to include specific elements of local mandatory training at this level, thereby enabling more generic training to be delivered by e-Learning?
8. Have we addressed the benefits of giving successful applicants access to their e-Learning via ESR Self Service prior to joining the organisation?