How JTGO has helped this charity better support young people

Teenage Helpline is a charity that helps young people across the UK. We recently chatted with Tom Overton, Recruitment & HR Manager at Teenage Helpline about the charity’s experience of using JTGO to manage their recruitment and the impact it’s had since they implemented it in Summer 2021.

Why did you choose JTGO?

At the time, we were looking at systems that would help with our recruitment. One of the main attractions of JTGO was the reporting that was available and already included in the product – with many of the other providers, reporting was added extra and was a significant additional fee!

What were your main objectives when you chose JTGO?

When we first started to look for a recruitment system, we were about to go through a mass recruitment campaign and needed something in place to manage that more efficiently. JTGO has simplified this for us; if we didn’t have JTGO, it would have taken us three times as long! Time-saving was one of our biggest objectives when we chose JTGO, and it’s definitely improved.

We’re about to move into starting our second big recruitment campaign using JTGO and looking forward to using what we learned the first time around.

“JTGO is very, very easy to use.”

Have you and your team had any experience of using recruitment software before?

As a charity, my team is all volunteers. Many of them work in recruitment for organisations like schools, universities, large scale companies, so most will have used recruitment software before. For me, I’ve used recruitment software that’s not friendly on the eyes – sometimes looking like Ceefax. JTGO is a breath of fresh air!

Being able to view CVs within the system has been a massive help too. We’ve used systems previously, where to be able to read a CV, we’d have to download it. We’ve had situations where we’ve needed to manually download 200 CVs to read them. JTGO has massively helped us from a GDPR and compliance side of things too - we always know that we’ll be compliant using JTGO.

How has JTGO helped with candidate attraction and advertising?

Candidate attraction has never really been a problem for us. But knowing we have all the data and statistics in JTGO to understand where our candidates are coming from can be mind-blowing - in a good way!

To understand which job advert sources candidates are coming from, when they came in, over what period – it’s great because we can use data presented on JTGO to understand what recruitment strategies are effective, therefore boosting our search efficiency.

Has using JTGO had an impact on other areas of your business?

JTGO has enabled us to invest more in what we do as a charity. We support young people through initiatives such as mental health support or problems they might be having at school – JTGO has allowed us to rapidly increase these.

What are your favourite elements of JTGO?

The recruitment funnel report has been really helpful, being able to easily track where applications are in the pipeline – it’s been really useful and something I wouldn’t necessarily have thought I needed until now!

The way that JTGO has been designed, means that in a nutshell, you don’t have to be a recruitment specialist to understand how to use it. It’s so simple and can be used ‘out of the box’ – but at the same time, there’s so much depth to what’s available that with a bit more time and effort, you can get even more out of it with some fine-tuning to suit your needs.

An industry stat I recently saw was 86% of candidates who apply for a job, if they had a good experience then they’ll apply again – and if they had a bad one, they’ll never come back. With JTGO, we now have candidates who apply through word of mouth after hearing positive feedback from others about the application process – it’s been great.

One of the best compliments I can give for JTGO is I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve not known how to do something. I’d give it a 10 out of 10 of how intuitive it is.

Has anything exceeded your expectations of using JTGO?

From a management point of view, the amount of data we can now access has gone beyond anything I ever expected.

I know of some recruitment software providers where you would have to pay a huge premium to have the types of reports, we have already included in JTGO.

When we were first starting to look at implementing a new recruitment system and we had our first conversations with you, we were amazed at the number of features that the system automatically included to us.

How would you sum up your feelings of working with us and how JTGO has benefitted your company?

The product is fantastic!

When new starters join our team, the feedback we get is how easy JTGO is to understand. Nobody wants to spend lots of time training their staff to use a system - and the intuitiveness of JTGO has cut that time for us dramatically.

We’ve also saved time for candidates by tailoring our application forms to be shorter. We’re only asking candidates for the information we really need, helping to improve the experience for candidates and reducing the risk of incomplete applications.

About Teenage Helpline

Teenage Helpline is a charitable organisation that provides services to young people across the UK. Their primary service involves putting young people in contact with peers, as well as providing peer-to-peer mentoring and other support that is required.