The Live Local, Work Local project has given us an opportunity to understand the local employment landscape in much more detail and to develop some tools to meet the needs of both employers and local residents. We began by researching commuter patterns and sentiment in the borough with a commuter survey. We then brought a group of our large local employers together to share this research and to further understand their needs. They then helped us design a solution to address the issues.
- Awareness raising among local residents – we needed a way to promote local employment opportunities and raise the profile of local employers within the borough to our local residents.
- Growing the talent pipeline – we also recognized the need to make secondary school age children aware of the range of jobs and sectors available locally. By connecting them to local employers, they can make more informed career decisions.
We developed a tender to create two websites which would be used to profile a number of our larger employers, allowing both residents and students to understand the range of opportunities and employers available.
The student-facing site is called Start Reigate & Banstead and leads young people through a series of steps to help them identify their skills, career options and examples of local employers and key employment sectors in the borough as well as ‘how to’ careers guides.
The RB-works site is targeted at the working age population and also contains information on each of the largest employment sectors within the borough, a live job search, an apprenticeship search, free digital skills training opportunities, advice on CV writing and Zoom interviews as well as case study blogs.
Both sites rely on dynamic as well as static content and a budget has been set aside for online promotion and advertising of the RB Works site.
Mo O’Brien, UK HR Director, Kimberly-Clark, said: “We are delighted to be working with Reigate & Banstead Borough Council to highlight employment opportunities with local businesses. We are always looking to find new talent locally and we offer a range of diverse opportunities based in Reigate but working across the EMEA (Europe, Middle-East and Africa) region and across our leading brands including Andrex, Kleenex and Huggies, as well as our Professional brands.”
Chloe Fineman, Technology Recruiter-GB, Willis Towers Watson, said: “The new Reigate & Banstead employment website is a free-to-use platform that will help to promote jobs in the local area. It is important that local opportunities are accessible and visible to residents and this is a quick and easy way for employers in the area to highlight the vacancies they have available.”