Customer Insight

North Yorkshire Council have been working with Matrix SCM for over a decade under our Neutral Vendor model. As an authority, North Yorkshire Council has an interesting geographical area as the largest county in England, as well as an interesting demographic, with a mix of deeply rural areas and large market towns. This has created a series of challenges with North Yorkshire Council’s recruitment. We have supported them to overcome these, and we will continue to do so.

Project Brief

Before partnering with Matrix SCM, North Yorkshire Council estimated that they had a spend of around £4million on temporary staffing that they were able to identify. They were experiencing problems with high agency margins and long contracts. As an example, one worker had been in a contract placement for 7 years. With a temporary recruitment strategy, that was not complimenting their overall strategy. Managers were experiencing low levels of satisfaction from the hiring model with low quality staff being provided by agencies.

This supplier-led approach to their recruitment meant that the Council had limited visibility over the workforce and were paying high margins. So, the first step of working together was to reduce their spend on agency, start engaging with local agencies for work and help them to get visibility and control over their agency spend.

Solutions

The effects of moving from a supplier-led approach to a Neutral Vendor managed service meant that, in the short term, North Yorkshire Council reduced costs by 20%. In the long term, we have continued to control costs with agency spend not increasing even with inflation. When it comes to contract reviews with suppliers, they have seen costs continue to reduce. All with the added benefit of having full visibility and control over their agency staff through CR.Net.

Now, North Yorkshire Council’s workforce is less than 1% agency. The suppliers they use have moved from a few agencies to over 40 regular suppliers that are proven to provide quality (60% of which are local SMEs). This helps the Council meet wider goals such as supporting local recruitment businesses.

Next Steps

We continue to work successfully with North Yorkshire Council; helping them to manage their agency workers through the Neutral Vendor managed service model that has continually delivered great results for over a decade.