Skills For Security

Skills for Security is the Fire & Security industry’s leading apprenticeship provider and offers a range of highly regarded technical training programmes.

Despite the company’s high profile, they’d spent six months trying to fill new instructor positions without success. Managing Director David Scott wanted a new approach and a colleague recommended Zitko.

Following conversations with its founder George Zitko, David agreed to appoint Zitko exclusively to run a recruitment campaign.

We recommended operating on a retained basis, to allow for a detailed discovery process and the extensive marketing activity we felt would be required.

Getting to The Heart of The Requirement

A review of the previous advertising suggested that the opportunities were not being promoted to full effect.

We explored with the client in-depth both why an ideal candidate would want to do the job and significantly, who that ideal candidate would be.

Various attractions came to light:

Skills for Security’s reputation and growth plans;
The fact they’d recently moved into new offices with state-of-the-art training labs and classrooms;
The potential for flexible working arrangements;
A central location;
Rather unusually for instructor roles, only limited travel required.

Profiling the right candidate proved fundamental to developing the proposition.

As well as experienced instructors, the company was happy to take on and train field engineers who particularly enjoyed supervising and coaching apprentices as part of their ‘day job’.

This widened the potential talent pool dramatically and formed the basis for our campaign.

Inspiring The Audience

To generate interest, we placed targeted advertising in key industry media, conducted a thorough search of our networks and publicised the role via social, using posts and video.

By making it clear the door was open for experienced engineers to become qualified full-time instructors we generated a large expression of interest.

From these enquiries, we qualified and shortlisted 15 candidates. The first appointee began their new job six weeks after we commenced the assignment.

Given the quality of the response, Skills for Security has an excellent pool of talent to approach for further appointments.

David Scott – Managing Director, Skills For Security

“Following a recommendation, I met with George at a conference. We spent an hour or two discussing the industry and I found his insights into talent acquisition very interesting.

“It was a simple decision to appoint the Zitko team for the assignment and the discovery process was especially eye-opening.

“The marketing campaign that followed was exceptional and demonstrated how presenting a compelling proposition to the right audience makes a world of difference.

“The shortlisting and interview processes went extremely smoothly. The Zitko team was on hand to make sure we and the candidates did each other justice!

“The retainer fee was money well-spent. The resulting partnership achieved more in six weeks than we had in the previous six months, going it alone.

“Recently, we've deepened our professional association as a founding partner in the new Zitko Talent programme. We're looking forward to achieving great things together.”

George Zitko – Managing Director, Zitko

“I was delighted that we could strengthen our partnership with Skills for Security. They're a highly respected company and were top of my list of potential training partners for Zitko Talent.

“With Skills for Security's reputation and the Zitko network and approach, we had all the ingredients necessary to make the instructor assignment work.

“It just needed some proper time and attention to conceive, plan and execute the right solution.”

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