The 300 North team works with talent across the FM space, placing people into senior FM roles, building services maintenance and installation roles, soft services cleaning and catering roles, as well as wider property and construction vacancies. These specialisms can all be found in our team of highly experienced recruiters with over 70 years of experience in recruiting within the FM sector between us. Over the last several months, we have had to change the way we work and the way we think about work. Some of these changes for us, have been radical. As a company with core values of honesty, integrity, knowledge and enthusiasm, we strive to respond to everyone who has applied for a role, no matter the circumstances. This supports our ethos of being a ‘people business that actually cares about people’ and also ensures we are hiring the best candidate for the job.

Responding to all applicants is part of our meticulous vetting process, which is highly valued by our clients and ensures every candidate passed on to the client is suitable for the role. This process also helps us to ensure a candidate embodies our values and that they are properly prepared for interview with knowledge of the role and the company. As things have moved online, we have maintained this process, and have focused on ensuring no candidate is left behind simply because they are unsure about video interviews, or about using the technology, because we work with each candidate right through to the interview stage. Our interview software Insight 300 has been a real help to clients and candidates in the last few months, and we expect this to continue into 2021 to assist us in our recruitment partnerships.

We are honest with our candidates and clients, and deliver an outstanding customer experience by having an in depth preparation session with each candidate going to interview to give them a knowledge base of the company they have applied to work at, give them a sense of the company culture and the people who already work in the business area and team they have applied to. We ensure that they know the environment in which they will be working, and allow them to ask any questions of us regarding the client. This also allows us to call attention to the clients’ CSR, sustainability practices, flexible working options and company benefits. We engage with our clients, many who have been with us for many years, to better know their culture and workplaces so well that we can promote these to our candidates and help them ascertain whether they’d be the right fit.

Doing this entirely remotely has been a challenge, as our job is to bring people together. Therefore we have invested in our Insight 300 video interviewing software. This has allowed us to further our goal of personable and caring recruitment by more efficiently allowing the client and candidate to interface and allowing us to more smoothly bridge the gap between them. This can include the 300 North team using a ‘live room’ to introduce the candidate and client to one another before handover to the interview.

Our clients have always needed candidates with flexibility to fill their roles, and over the past year our own flexibility has been needed. We have had to adopt this skill in order to continue recruiting successfully for our clients. We have been able to meet their needs by hiring efficiently and rapidly. This year has seen a number of examples of recruiting candidates into jobs under very strict deadlines including starting five temporary site managers in Yorkshire within 24 hours! We have worked hard to find temporary cover hospital staff at our clients’ sites, including group hires of up to 20 soft services staff for one site.

We have also worked together to bring the best candidates to a single contract, fulfilling 5 of 7 completely different roles for one of our new clients in a short timeframe, with most candidates able to fill the position immediately or within two weeks. We were able to demonstrate our efficiency and people centred approach here and when we had to step in for a client in the North West who needed diverse roles recruiting for, and had spent some time not being able to find those candidates elsewhere. As a team we have a diverse array of specialisms, which makes us comfortable recruiting for new and different job requirements, such as recent BMS Project Engineers, Lifecyle Project Managers, SPV Managers, Decontamination Engineers and Water Treatment Managers to name a few.

Community Spirit

As much as we love to support our clients and candidates in the best way we can, we couldn’t do any of that without supporting each other. We’ve set many goals for ourselves over the years for charity, for helping the local community, for mental health, and for building us into a stronger team. It’s been really important to us to focus on this during the pandemic, which is why we took part in the ParetoFM 10K, cycled 598 miles and dressed in blue for Smart Works Leeds’ charity events, challenged each other to step together, baked tasty goodies for National Baking Week, signed up to the Mindful Employer Charter, conquered Pen-y-gent, and had a socially distanced picnic together.

2020 was so difficult for many people in our community, and we knew we would have to do what we could to continue our community support. We made more of an effort to buy locally where we could, supporting small businesses as much as possible. We’ve continued donating to our local foodbanks, and ensured that we continued to be as sustainable a business as we could. We also continued our support for Smart Works, a charity close to our heart as it supports women of all backgrounds throughout their employment journey.

Looking Forward

After a relatively successful year, we are looking forward to 2021 with confidence in the market, which seems to have picked up again even in the last few weeks. Due to the encouraging short term growth over the last few months on both our side and our clients’ side, we are looking to expand our business in the new year, and bring new people into the company including more experienced recruiters as well as apprentices. We hope that this will help us to develop more meaningful relationships with our local community and get local people into FM and FM Recruitment. We’ll of course be looking for more of the best candidates for positions across the North and nationally, and hope to expand our candidate reach through caring and relationship building recruitment. Outside of our recruiting, we are of course looking to a COVID-19 vaccine to reinvigorate a sense of normality to all of our lives. Most of all we are looking forward to getting together safely as team, and to enjoying each others company, be that at work in the office, at team away days, or in the pub after a hard day’s graft.

Finally we wish our clients and candidates every success for the New Year, and we hope everyone stays happy and healthy.
Merry Christmas from all of us at 300 North, and a happy new year!

300 North are the Facilities Management recruitment specialists providing permanent, temporary and interim solutions to the UK Facilities Management, Mechanical & Electrical and Construction sectors. Get in touch to find out how we can help you with your recruitment needs by visiting our website home page or calling us on 0113 336 5161.