How Global Sports delivered a high volume, quality focused jobs board platform for the sport and physical activity sector in partnership with CIMSPA. Initially part of their 'retrain to retain' COVID-19 pandemic recovery programme, the solution has now evolved to become a key product within the CIMSPA Careers Hub.
Background
ReTrain to Retain is a job retention and support package funded by Sport England through the National Lottery and being delivered by CIMSPA - the professional body for the sport and physical activity workforce.
The scheme aims to support the estimated 50,000 sport and physical activity professionals and volunteers in the UK who have had their employment affected by the COVID-19 pandemic with a series of training, resources, and tools.
CIMSPA competitively tendered through an RFP for the rapid development of a dedicated Job Board, that would integrate from a broad selection of CIMPSA member career sites. Global Sports successfully won the tender, scoring highly in all categories, and subsequently designed, build and implemented the platform on time and within budget.
"GSJ’s application to tender was exceptional probably the best I’ve seen, taking time to understand our business and provided a thoroughly comprehensive tender document."
Colin Huffen, Head of Standards and Regulations, CIMSPA
The result was a jobs board that currently delivers over 4500 jobs daily through an automated feed. It is seamlessly integrated into the Retrain-to-Retain website, providing a new industry leading digital ‘destination’ for sport and physical activity professionals to find opportunities and routes back into the sector.
The Challenge
Speed to market was key
The necessity for the job board to be delivered in a tight timeframe was a key criteria for award in the RFP. The impact of the pandemic on the sports and physical activity industry has been well documented and CIMSPA wanted to help support professionals across the project as quickly as possible.
A high-quality, high-volume jobs board with low operational overheads
How to deliver a high volume of jobs from the diverse employers that represent the industry with little or no day-to-day resource management? This was a fundamental requirement for the solution to address, while ensuring the quality and segmentation of employers and jobs was robust, automated without duplication, expired jobs or a clunky job seekers experience.
"At the outset we had no idea what volume and breadth of jobs we would be able to find through our partners, this was the biggest project risk we had identified. Through frequent and clear contact and foresight to overcome any potential barriers, within a few weeks it was clear Global Sports would exceed our expectations and we could lower that risk."
Colin Huffen, Head of Standards and Regulations, CIMSPA
Helping the refinement of the CIMSPA Industry Career Paths Definition
CIMSPA had previously invested in a taxonomy and breakdown of how the Sports & Physical activity sector can be defined. Global Spots was able to provide additional definition and advice around the career paths. For example, the project helped provide further groupings of jobs available in the industry, and the key words associated with them enabled further key words to be, to develop a solution with search taxonomies that clearly distinguished between industries and occupations for a wide range of job types that delivered a simple user experience.
The Solution
"Not only did the quality of the end product exceed our expectations, Global Sports delivered the project very quickly, bringing it in within the agreed timeframe with no delay."
Colin Huffen, Head of Standards and Regulations, CIMSPA
Global Sports delivered a complete ‘go live’ careers platform advertising 4.5K jobs at launch within six weeks. The project was executed across three distinct phases in close collaboration with the key CIMSPA stakeholders:
Phase 1: Requirements & Specification
Collaborative workshops between CIMSPA and Global Sports to establish outcomes, key features, branding, technical specifications and roadmap.
Phase 2: Platform Build & Development
The development of the platform centred around two key pillars. The website build and the jobs feed technology that would power the job board to ensure a fully automated solution.
We used market leading jobs aggregation technology to deliver the jobs feed. CIMPSA identified the employers they wanted to include on the jobs board, we created a bespoke jobs feed that would guarantee the quality of opportunities utilising advanced AI. By excluding aggregator platforms (which is a typical approach for this type of project) and focusing on specific employer career pages we could design a feed with full control of the employers and jobs that advertised, including no job duplication or missing job criteria while delivering a fully automated solution that requires limited operational overheads once live.
The website replicated the visual identity of the Retain-to-Retain site, so that it could be embedded within the top navigation of the site and seem native to the end user. Through delivering job landing, job search and job description pages and associated site taxonomy Global Sports was able to deliver a high quality jobs board with consistent look and feel and functionality of all jobs and employers.
Phase 3: Operational Management
The effective and correct automated categorisation of the jobs onto the jobsboard from their source required extensive testing and fine tuning to ensure the variety of job titles for the diverse range of jobs were considered and effectively tagged. The aggregation technology used is AI powered, allowing us to define job title ‘keywords’ that it would use to match jobs to their correct categories such as functional area, sector and location, with 95% reliability.
The technology will also continue to ‘learn’ and improve the results the longer the job board stays live.
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The Results
- Delivered a high quality, high volume jobs board within a 6 week development cycle that utilises leading technology that at launch delivered 4.5K jobs from over 90 companies.
"We are very please with the outcome, now having a jobs board with a huge breadth and volume of roles that are specifically based around the parameters we set."
Colin Huffen, Head of Standards and Regulations, CIMSPA
- Provide an immediate solution to aid the recovery of an industry within sport that has been heavily impacted by the COVID-19 and support the industries recovery and future.
- Innovative aggregation technology provides assurance of job and employer quality while hosting an industry wide jobs platform that requires no resource to maintain.
- A robust jobs board solution that can host unlimited number of jobs with the potential to easily scale the volume of jobs and employers with ‘one click’.
"Coming in ahead of time, in budget and the open regular communication with people talking the same language, lead to an outcome that has exceeded our expectations."
View the CIMSPA platform launch press release here.
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