Our developers have been looking to the future, daring to imagine a post-Covid world and hiring boom coming this year. These are both lovely ideas, but what if they became a reality sometime soon?
One can only hope – and plan!
So our devs took another look at our graduate search feature, and decided that the way we tag locations could be a lot better.
A couple of weeks and a thousand cups of coffee later, our new location tagging system is running.
What does this mean for you?
Now that locations are controlled by our grads, finding the perfect person for your role will be a lot easier.
Lots of our employers love taking hiring into their own hands using our hiring platform’s search tool. If you’re one of these proactive employers, this update is big news for you.
You’ll be able to search not just by country or nearest city, but towns and connected areas.
We’ve taken open data from the Office for National Statistics, alongside our own and used it to organise the country into areas based on how people actually commute to work. This means that your search for graduates in Oxford will now show results for High Wycombe, Cheltenham and everywhere else in commuting distance.
And because graduates can edit their location data whenever they want – if they move out or back home with mum and dad – these search results will be live and accurate.
We know that where people want to work is rarely as straightforward as where they’re currently living. Our candidates might hope to find a job that allows them to move back closer to family … or stay further away, perhaps in the city that they studied in. Our platform is designed to handle that complexity.
So you’ll have an easier time cherry-picking candidates in your area and we will be able to find local grads for you much faster too.
How does it work?
When our graduates first make an account, they will be prompted to fill in a few forms and give us some important information – including their postcode.
From there we have their basic location, but we wanted to make the tagger more dynamic and customisable. So now graduates can go into their profile builder and click into the location chooser.
And if they miss it in the rush of editing their work experience, our handy robot will ask them to fill in their details.
The location tagger begins looking at the graduate’s postcode, suggesting first their immediate local area. For example, an OX postcode will suggest Oxford.
Then the tagger then suggests areas they might like to work in based on their location and what we know about travel patterns. Grads can use the map to click or type in their locations for more accuracy.
After choosing their preferred locations, there are options for:
- Remote working
- No relocation
- Relocation across anywhere in the UK
- Or relocation only to major cities in the UK
Once this is all completed, the location tagger will update the candidate’s profile.
So that when you search for graduates, you’ll be able to quickly see accurate location data in the basic search and on individual profiles.
Try out the new and improved search feature on our hiring platform today!