Tracking people and cars. The innovative way Aspire People uses Leave Dates to support their growing client base

Aspire People is one of the UK's top 20 education industry recruitment agencies, with 110 staff members (and counting) placing around 3000 teachers every week. Standing tall against competitors with a global presence, we had to know what makes them so successful. We chatted with Managing Director Daniel Dawkins to discover how his dynamic team pushed through the COVID era with happy clients and an even happier team.

Building a flexible and wellness-focused team with happy clients

As they approach their 20th year in business, Daniel reflects on the achievements of his growing team and their endless drive to build great relationships - the backbone of every successful business. While many companies struggled to adapt to remote working during the COVID era, Aspire People had already laid the groundwork to step right into work-from-home mode, as the company already had a flexible working policy.

With his Finance and Operations background, Daniel invested in keeping his staff well-resourced while working remotely, confident that the market would bounce back and soar again.

"Furlough was a tough and unsure time for most people, but some market conditions indicated the market being strong afterwards. So we invested our cash reserves in looking after our clients and candidates, even at a cost to us during that period."

Right, he was. Keeping in touch with clients and candidates through uncertain days made their team most memorable as life and work returned to normal. Of course, the approach was three-tiered to benefit consultants. As people began returning to work, Aspire People recruited consultants to work in a buddy system and prolong a positive experience with the company. With one consultant working on business development, and another managing candidates, the team are productive and able to focus on placing nearly 30,000 educators every year and staying happy in their roles.

"Our consultants are not burning out in their roles because they have someone to share the load with, turnover is low, desks are growing, and profitability grows steadily."

Innovative absence management for people (and the company cars)

Before they moved to Leave Dates in 2022, their team of around 75 managed leave using an Excel spreadsheet that they could view on SharePoint. Finding that it wasn't visual enough to do the job and that access was somewhat limited, they decided to move to Leave Dates for real-time updates and streamlined communication. Of course, we love knowing how Leave Dates helps our customers, but Daniel's team has been extra creative in using it.

"Leave Dates is going really well for us. We use it for our team's leave but also for our pool cars."

"Our team regularly do site visits, so we use pool cars so our consultants don't have to use their own vehicles. We have set the pool cars up as people in Leave Dates, and the team can see their availability in the app."

The seven pool cars can be used by anyone in the business, which they found difficult to manage before Leave Dates when cars would start and finish the day at different offices or requests to book cars would be untraceable. When a team member is ready to use a car, they can be viewed in their own department. Admin books leave for the car and include the borrower's name with start and finish locations in the comment field. With over 100 staff eligible to use the fleet, this simple but innovative use of Leave Dates has been a welcome change for everyone at Aspire People.

The verdict

A company as committed to staff, clients and candidates as Aspire People deserves the best tools for managing leave and absence, and Daniel feels that they have this in Leave Dates.

"Leave Dates has done wonders for us," he says.

"We pride ourselves on being available to service our clients. As a team, we are very good at managing the availability of candidates for our education clients through our CRM, so we know when a system is sound. Leave Dates was excellent at managing absences for our internal staff. "

With admin using Leave Dates on desktop and the team usually requesting and managing their own leave on mobile, Daniel's team is now well-equipped to manage absence across all 11 branches. Using Leave Dates, the Aspire People team is always certain that someone is available to meet the needs of clients and candidates.