The Customer

Our customer specialises in the delivery of essential public services, with over 500,000 of its people working across 7 operating divisions. Comensura are the managed service provider of temporary workers to all divisions within the customer, ensuring that a broad range of temporary workers, including call centre staff, drivers, loaders and catering and cleaning staff are deployed.

The Challenge

The outbreak of the Pandemic led to a large increase in demand for services across the customer’s healthcare estate, which usually consists of 16 hospital locations across the UK but was expanded to support the national crisis. COVID-19’s impact meant that the customer’s demand for workers in this area almost tripled in less than two months. Elsewhere, the customer was awarded a contract to manage call handling for contact tracing which also necessitated the recruitment of huge volumes of staff to be recruited, trained and deployed in a matter of days.

The Solution

To accommodate customer exponential increase in demand for workers, Comensura implemented a bespoke, project-based volume fill model utilising recruitment agency partners to successfully deliver the number of contingent workers required to set up pop-up hospitals, COVID-19 testing centres and contact tracing. The extensive experience and understanding of the recruitment industry held by our teams has been critical in delivering this requirement, as has our close working relationships with our agency supply chain. In all areas, agency margins have remained consistent with our ‘business as usual’ rates, ensuring the customer receives great best value. Nearly 2000 workers were onboarded during the period.

The Benefits

With the customers demand tripling in less than two months, the main benefit was to have a supply chain with the geographical reach and specialism to fill each role. Circa 2,000 contingent workers were hired, in an average 7 day turnaround for each role across a broad range of hospitals, pop-up hospitals, testing centres and agents for the contact tracing service.