National Rugby League (NRL) is the governing body of all things Rugby League in Australia; running everything from the Telstra Premiership through to grassroots football every weekend. NRL employs 500 permanent staff and 250-300 casuals throughout the year.
The People & Culture team have 5 JobAdder users, but Dan Buckley, Talent Acquisition Manager is the main user of JobAdder on a daily basis, managing all recruitment nationally. They are about to hire their 200th person through JobAdder.
The Challenge
NRL has come a long way, it has changed from being just a sport to a business. Before JobAdder, NRL was using a free version CRM which had some capability, but wasn’t close to the capabilities on offer with JobAdder for talent management, advised Dan.
After reviewing a few systems, the speed of implementation, scalability and value for money gave JobAdder the advantage. NRL can have 30+ open roles at any one time, in particular, the NRL experienced a huge growth phase in the last 12 months (2017 – 2018); bringing all digital assets back in-house, their digital division alone grew from 6 to 96 employees. Recruiting for a variety of roles across the business from Game Development Officers through to all roles within the Finance, Marketing, Commercial, Digital, Integrity and People & Culture teams.
Hiring at a rate of approximately 4 people a week, they are interviewing 20-30 candidates per week. “With that amount of interviews and only one person organising them, we needed a system that allowed us to do so quickly and effectively. With JobAdder it’s really easy- a click of a button, change date, select template, add position description and away we go,” said Dan Buckley.
The JobAdder Solution
JobAdder has allowed NRL to organise recruitment, manage and track applicants a lot better than previously had been done, saving an estimated $1.5 – $2 million.
Having a central portal was essential to manage the large volume of recruitment. “When recruiting the volume that we are, you need that (central portal), there’s no time to find missing emails,” explained Dan.
Everything is centralised; everything is contained within one place. The simplicity of submitting applicants to managers and receiving feedback within the portal (HiringManager) and being able to attach a photo and resume to present the candidate in a fresh way is one of NRL’s most used and favourite features. Also, having the ability to mass mail candidates and automate as much as possible and schedule multiple candidate interviews, quickly and easily in just a few clicks.
“The overall experience with JobAdder has been very good, being able to set up the system so quickly, the price is great, for what we do with it we get a lot of value for money, there’s very little, if any downtime, which for a SaaS system is great.
I like the mobile component, I can use the app and see where I’m at- if I need to contact a candidate when I’m away from my desk I can easily access their information and give them a call and it logs it as a note on the candidate files as well. There’s a lot of benefits.”
