In October 2021, Opus was contacted by Brentwood Borough Council to support with the reopening of the Brentwood Leisure Centre. The leisure centre was a vital hub for the Brentwood community and the council were keen to reopen it as quickly as possible, setting a date for early December 2020.
Due to the large levels of resource required and short time scale, Brentwood knew that they would need to adopt an innovative approach to recruitment and therefore enlisted the support of Opus. We met with the HR team to discuss the councils needs and create an action plan which would ensure the goals were met within the timescale.
Throughout the project Opus worked diligently alongside Brentwood’s HR and Communications teams to create job descriptions, advertise jobs, arrange interviews and carry out compliance checks for new workers, using all suitable resources and channels including, websites, jobs boards, social media and the press to attract candidates. This included reaching out to previous employees to regain trust and share the new visons for the leisure centre.
On the first weekend of going live, the roles received nearly 1000 views on the Opus thanks to the combined promotion from Opus and Brentwood Borough Council and in just three weeks the teams recruited over 50 individuals, enabling the Leisure Centre to open doors to the public as promised on the 5 December 2020.
The partnership was a testament to the value that collaboration in recruitment can add and both Opus and Brentwood Borough Council were recognised for this at the 2020 PPMA Excellence in HR awards where the organisations won the award for Best Partnership/Collaboration. In addition to this the partnership was also recognised as the winner of the overall Gold Award recognising the best entry out of all the categories.