Fire and Rescue NSW

The challenge

Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) is one of the world’s largest urban fire and rescue services, serving the Australian community with courage and care, without judgement.

Its diverse, highly-skilled workforce is comprisedcomprized of a wide variety of roles, including: permanent and on-call frontline firefighters, corporate and administrative roles, trade-based roles, and non-station-based operational roles. Each have unique, highly-specific recruitment requirements and challenges.

In order to cater for both centralisedcentralized and decentraliseddecentralized recruitment processes, its Talent Acquisition (TA) team needed to collaborate with field-based administrative teams and hiring managers to meet those needs.

At the heart of this challenge was managing their large, annual recruitment campaign for permanent firefighters, which typically attracts upwards of 5,000 applications. No small feat for a lean recruitment team.

TA needed to manage thousands of applications, qualify candidates through a vast number of pre-screening steps —approximately 68, to boot!— and ensure compliance with safety and training requirements.

The focus

For its annual firefighter recruitment campaign, the TA team needed to progress candidates through a vast number of important pre-screening steps, including: psychometric, behavioural, physical, and medical testing, as well as online video and panel interviewing, group activities, questionnaires, and training.

A flexible, scalable solution with integration capabilities would enable them to streamline these processes by:

improving internal collaboration
reducing manual, paper-based processing
effectively managing a high volume of applications and reducing ineligible applications through established criteria
progressing and facilitating efficient communication with candidates.

“There aren’t many organisationsorganizations that have such a complex, in-depth recruitment process. We chose PageUp as our ATS, primarily because it would enable us to efficiently handle bulk recruitment, from application to onboarding.”

–Sally Langley, Principal Project Manager – IT Directorate, FRNSW

The solution

When FRNSW partnered with PageUp, TA was concerned about how implementation would be received internally – but this was short-lived.

“Having been at FRNSW for more than 13 years, this was one of the smoothest implementations I’ve experienced. With support from our dedicated Professional Services Consultant, we had a strong onboarding process, there was real collaboration. We managed to troubleshoot, create solutions that worked with the system, reduce impact on teams and hiring managers, and improve business processes overall.”

–Sally Langley, Principal Project Manager – IT Directorate, FRNSW

With this win under their belt, the team launched their annual recruitment campaign for firefighters. As thousands of applications flowed through, established criteria enabled recruiters to filter ineligible applications, designate candidate statuses, and progress them accordingly.

“Previously, slow communication and manually booking candidates in for interviews, testing, and assessments meant we were inundated with calls from candidates. Now, we do it all through PageUp. From a user and candidate perspective, it’s seamless.

“From a data security perspective too, going from a manual to a digital system has given us more peace of mind over storage and visibility of candidate data, as we can easily invite users and manage access.”

–Amy Hurst, Talent Acquisition Manager, FRNSW

“Setting up multiple recruitment events and sharing them with candidates is a breeze. We’re able to share important information through one applicant portal, including offers during the final stages. PageUp integrations for pre-screening and onboarding have made a huge difference.”

–Renay Whitney, Talent Acquisition Advisor, FRNSW

While TA initially chose PageUp as their ATS, they are now taking advantage of its career site capabilities.

Paguep Fire Rescue Nsw Career Site

“We’ve been able to strengthen our employer brand and drive traffic to our career site. It’s been a huge, surprising success that we hadn’t initially considered. It’s been such a great asset to our organisationorganization, and even brings out our creative side! We’re looking forward to growing our talent marketing capabilities through this channel.”

–Amy Hurst, Talent Acquisition Manager, FRNSW

PageUp reporting functionality has enabled TA to demonstrate their effectiveness. For instance, by implementing critical eligibility criteria at the start of the application process, they saw more than 5,000 application ‘starts’ reduce to 3,000+ completed applications for their assessment. They are also using metrics to strengthen and validate recruitment marketing efforts.

“We coordinated with our communication team on a recruitment marketing campaign with Nova radio. When we had status-update meetings with Nova’s marketing team, we were able to directly correlate increases in our career site traffic with marketing activities. Being able to validate and confirm the impact of our initiatives is amazing.”

– Amy Hurst, Talent Acquisition Manager, FRNSW

They are sharing important metrics for corporate and trade roles with senior leaders, specific to their areas – such as time-to-hire. Diversity data is also playing an important role in their external recruitment efforts, ensuring the organisationorganization’s practices attract a range of people with diverse backgrounds and skills.

“Feedback from hiring managers has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly about how user-friendly, straightforward, and intuitive the system is. The implementation was extremely smooth. Our CSM provided fantastic support and quick responses any time we had questions. Internally, it’s brought us together, strengthening relationships between teams that would have never happened without this project.

“Creating a better experience for our recruiters benefits our employer brand, and in turn, benefits our candidates. As a team, we can achieve so much more with greater efficiency, time, and productivity. PageUp has been great for us and benefited everyone involved in the process.”

– Amy Hurst, Talent Acquisition Manager, FRNSW