Halton CAB's experience of Future Jobs Fund

      
Here's some extremely useful information that HVA recieved from Hitesh Patel (Halton CAB CEO).

Introduction:

In January 2010, the CAB made the decision to take advantage of the then government’s “Future Jobs Fund” initiative. The CAB already had an established volunteer training programme and so it was relatively easy to write formal Job Descriptions and Person Specifications for these roles.

The jobs were advertised through the Job Centre via Halton People into Jobs (HPiJ). In total we interviewed around thirty applicants and we offer “FJF jobs” to six people, most of whom were Halton residents.

Lessons learnt:

- Prepare a proper job pack so that everyone (i.e. the applicant, HPiJ, Job Centre Plus) knows exactly what skills you are after and what the job entails.

- Don’t tolerate any interviewees with a poor attitude no matter how good their CV; they will only be with you for 6 months it is not worth disrupting your team spirit.

- Be alert and try to spot “an individual’s potential”. A lot of applicants had very low self-esteem and did not perform terribly well at interview, but within a few months of being with us they have blossomed into fantastic hard-working colleagues.

- Make sure you do a proper induction and have a pre-planned training programme for the new recruits. Unlike volunteers, they are with you full time but many organisations do not have the management resources to watch over them full time.

- Although full-time positions, those recruits that had to travel long distances to get into our office were allowed to reduce their worked hours per week.

- Make sure you have the “desk space” to place all your new recruits. We risked alienated a few our existing long-serving volunteers because recruited too many FJF workers all in one go. Also, make sure there is enough work to go around… otherwise they will get bored and could disrupt other workers.

- Treat FJF workers as employees…not volunteers! They are being paid to be with your organisation and so there is a higher level of expectation of them. If you find the FJF worker is not suited to your organisation then you can terminate the position just as you would with any other new recruit on their probationary period.

- Be imaginative as to how you can use the FJF people; you can use them as receptionists, etc. But we also used them to conduct telephone customer satisfaction surveys, which did not require much training.

- Give the FJF workers some time off for job-search and do keep encouraging them to scour the job pages… unless you plan to offer them a permanent job.

- There are costs involved… e.g. training, supervision, travel etc. and you need to work out if having FJF jobs offers your organisation enough “return on investment”.

Hitesh Patel