The organisation
NOCN is a market-leading international Awarding Organisation (AO) and Government-approved End Point Assessment Organisation (EPAO) that has been creating opportunities for 30 years.
The Group includes NOCN, NOCN India Skills Foundation, CSkills Awards and One Awards, trusted and recognised by employers, training providers and learners in the UK and internationally.
Protocol has been working closely with NOCN to recruit End-Point Assessors since the introduction of the role in 2017.
The requirements
As part of their growth plans, and as approved recruiters for NOCN, Protocol were approached to lead on the recruitment for this role: Relationship Manager End Point Assessor (Banking) Level 6.
End-point assessment is a huge area of demand at present following Apprenticeship reforms, where the supply of talent simply does not meet the demands of current growth; inevitably leading to a tough recruitment selection process. Protocol believe that no role is unfillable – some just take that little bit of extra time, knowledge, creativity and persistency during the recruitment process.
The recruitment process
What makes Protocol different is our ability to think outside the box – when a role requires extra creativity to find the right talent, we’ll try every potential approach that could lead us to the right candidate! With so many tools at our disposal, we can take a unique approach to each recruitment campaign, based on what we think will yield the best result.
For this role we knew the ideal candidate was likely to be within industry, not already working in education. Knowing that the right person wouldn’t necessarily know what an end-point assessor was – or if they did, wouldn’t realise they were qualified to do the role – we made sure the advert targeted those in industry, explaining the responsibilities of an EPA, making it more appealing to those without a background in education.
We increased the level of head-hunting activity across LinkedIn and through our network, knowing that some of the best potential candidates may not be actively looking for extra work. From past recruitment campaigns we knew we would probably need to speak to them directly and highlight the advantages of a career in end-point assessment, reinforcing that much of this role can be done alongside their current employment.
Finally, we also identified particular membership bodies and previous employers who were relevant, then proceeded to contact relationship managers who were affiliated with them. This led us to some fantastic candidates with the right level of experience in the areas NOCN were looking for.
The outcome
Although the large majority of applicants we spoke to met most of the criteria, we specifically struggled to find someone with an assessor’s qualification. Discussing this problem with our client, we decided to advise and recommend the CAVA qualification, be patient and see out the process to enrolment – enabling us to then shortlist candidates meeting the full requirement.
