Skills City boosts job placements with its private talent marketplaces
Introduction
Skills City is a unique digital skills powerhouse dedicated to transforming talent diversity across the North West and West Midlands. As a leading provider of digital technology Skills Bootcamps, and backed by the Department for Education (DfE) Skills for Life initiative, Skills City successfully fast-tracks over 1000 people into technology careers annually. Catering to a diverse range of individuals seeking to up-skill, retrain, or launch a tech career in areas such as Cyber Security, Cloud Engineering, Data Analytics, Games Development, Unity Development, and Software Engineering, Skills City has become a prominent force in the tech education sector. However, despite their impressive track record, Skills City faced considerable challenges in efficiently placing its learners into interviews and job opportunities.
Enter Spacewalk’s talent marketplace platform, which revolutionised the way Skills City connected its learners with potential employers and setting the stage for Skills City’s continued growth.
In this case study, we will explore how the collaboration between Skills City and Spacewalk has enabled Skills City to successfully place hundreds of learners in rewarding job opportunities.
Key challenges for skills bootcamps
With over 1000 learners annually undertaking its skills bootcamps, Skills City faced an increasing challenge to efficiently connect its learners to employment opportunities. The challenge included:
- Matching each learner to relevant new opportunities that suit them
- Notifying each learner when suitable job opportunities become available
- Understanding if learners are interested in being put forward for relevant opportunities
- Screening applications for each role to understand who should be put forward for interviews at employers
Existing traditional methods such as spreadsheets, emails and phone calls are so time consuming and inefficient. Skills City looked at traditional jobs boards but found them to be overly complex and expensive and without the ability to control access or to match its learners to job opportunities.
With Skills City’s continued growth plans and a desire to improve job placement outcomes for its learners it was evident that a more streamlined solution was necessary to overcome these challenges and revolutionise the way Skills City connected its learners with potential employers.
Solution
In early 2021, when Spacewalk first released its talent marketplace platform, Skills City connected with Spacewalk to help revolutionise their job placement process. Through piloting Spacewalk with a test cohort, Skills City were able to understand the potential of Spacewalk’s talent marketplace platform and adopted it for all cohorts. By working closely together, Spacewalk implemented new features to ensure a streamlined process for Skills City and its learners.
Here’s how it works:
- Skills City creates a dedicated private talent marketplace for each of its skills bootcamps’ cohorts
- Learners are invited to join their cohort’s marketplace and create their profile in minutes
- Skills City posts job opportunities and they appear on selected talent marketplaces
- As soon as opportunities are posted relevant learners are notified instantly
- Learners apply for opportunities with a single touch and optionally add their CV and a cover note. Learners can view all their applications in one place, including the status of each opportunity
- Skills City hiring managers screen and review applications together, including viewing a summary of all applicants as well as each applicant’s full profile and CV
- Skills City hiring managers contact applicants to progress their applications to interview
- Once roles are filled or closed then the Skills City team close and archive them
- Spacewalk’s user-friendly dashboard enables Skills City to manage this entire process all in one central location
With Spacewalk, Skills City was able to overcome the challenges posed by their previous manual processes, transforming the way they connected learners with potential employers and optimising their overall job placement outcomes for the benefit of their learners and Skills City’s employer network.
Results
Through using Spacewalk, Skills City has achieved the following:
- Increased interview placements
- Higher job offer rates
- Reduced time-to-hire on job opportunities (often multiple applications are received within minutes of the job opportunity being posted)
- Improved and efficient job placement outcomes, enabling Skills City to continue its growth plans for its skills bootcamps
- Enabled Skills City to impact the diverse local community and bridge the skills gap in the tech sector
I cannot emphasise enough the transformative impact Spacewalk's talent marketplace platform has had on our organisation.
Spacewalk has revolutionised the way we connect our diverse learners with suitable job opportunities, significantly reducing the time and effort required in the process.
The platform's user-friendly design, easy setup, and exceptional customisation features make it an ideal solution for any skills bootcamp looking to optimise their job placement outcomes.
Our learners and employer partners have praised the seamless experience, and we've seen an impressive increase in interview placements and job offer rates.
I wholeheartedly recommend Spacewalk to any skills bootcamp seeking a powerful and efficient tool to connect their talent with the right opportunities.
- Paul Spooner, Head of Delivery, Skills City
What’s coming next
Skills City and Spacewalk continue to work closely together on a roadmap that benefits the learners and the Skills City team. Some examples of forthcoming features include:
- Notifying each learner on the status of their application for each job opportunity
- Automated metrics and reporting for DfE purposes [UPDATE - this is now live!]
- ChatGPT integration to further simplify workflows and surface insights
Learn more
Interested in using Spacewalk for your skills bootcamps too? Spacewalk is available for skills bootcamps in any country and you can set up your own talent marketplace in as little as 10 minutes. Learn more.
Get started with a free 30-day trial today (no credit card details required)
