Hays Recruitment: Pulse case study

One hour, full marks: how Hays uses Neighbourly Pulse to build social value plans that work for local communities.

For Hays, a leading specialist recruitment and workforce solutions partner, social value is closely related to its role in helping people, organisations and communities move forward.

Peter Milligan, Associate Bids Director at Hays and his team have experience developing considered social value plans, supported by local research and a clear understanding of where Hays’ activity could create meaningful impact. The challenge was bringing that evidence together quickly and clearly, in a way that strengthened each response. Neighbourly Pulse gave them a quicker, more visual way to do that.

That changed when they started using Neighbourly Pulse.

“Before, we had a clear understanding of what we were delivering, but it was challenging to access the right data to evidence and articulate the rationale behind our approach”.

The challenge with social value evidence

When a tender requires localised social value data, the clock starts ticking immediately. For Peter and the team of five bid managers and three co-ordinators, that meant manual research: sifting through the indices of multiple deprivation, downloading colossal government spreadsheets, and trying to extract what was actually useful from what Peter describes as a “highly detailed and fragmented data landscape”.

For a large London council bid, sourcing and interpreting the data needed took Peter and two colleagues a significant amount of time and effort. Without a clear, quick way to interpret the data, it took longer to build the kind of detailed, specific evidence that brings a social value response to life.

Peter was confident in what Hays was delivering for communities. What was more challenging was clearly articulating why they’d chosen to focus on a particular area, in a particular way, for that specific client.

Discovering Pulse

Neighbourly’s Pulse tool made an impression on Peter the moment he opened it. Looking at the visual heat maps and the lists of local charities and community organisations, it was clear: “This is going to be really easy for us to put a plan together that makes sense to the client”.

For a public sector Northern Ireland bid, Peter spent just 25 minutes with a colleague pulling everything they needed. Pulse enabled them to focus on employability-related deprivation in Belfast, the domain most relevant to Hays’ work, and it became instantly clear where the real need was. And this wasn’t generally across the whole city, but in the North East, specifically.

That precision supported the entire response. Instead of a city-wide pledge to run CV workshops, Hays could propose a targeted plan focused on the areas where it would have the most impact, with data and visuals to back it up. Pulse’s charity data was pulled directly into the bid as screenshots, making the response visually compelling without sacrificing its word count.

Scoring 100% on social value

The results followed. For a housing association tender in North East England, Hays scored full marks on the social value question. Peter and the team put this down in part to the clarity Pulse gave them: not just what they would do, but why they had chosen that particular programme and location. The visual heat maps made it easy to articulate that reasoning clearly – and just as easy for the client to see it too. Evaluators could see that Hays had genuinely thought about community needs, tailored specifically to that area.

“Pulse complemented Hays’ established social value programmes by helping the team target those activities more precisely to local community needs”.

Scoring maximum marks on social value for this tender gave the team confidence that their process worked, and it’s stayed consistent since. But for Hays, the real value goes beyond the score. A structured, repeatable approach means less time spent on research and more time spent applying specialist insight to the plan itself – and, ultimately, backing the activities and locations that will make the most difference to the communities they’re working with.

Building it into the process

What stands out about Hays’ experience is how quickly Pulse became embedded in their standard workflow.

Peter has run sessions with his team to walk them through exactly how he has used Pulse on real bids. The expectation is now simple: when a tender with asocial value requirement lands, the bid coordinator pulls the data, unprompted, before the planning session with the sales team begins.

Most tools offer speed or quality. Pulse, in Peter’s experience, delivers both. A short call with a colleague was enough to pull the data needed to support a full bid response. Research that may have taken up to a day now takes less than half an hour, with better, more specific output.

For a busy team managing multiple bids at once, that is a meaningful difference: giving Hays more time to focus on specialist insight, stronger client responses and social value plans that can create lasting progress for local communities.

For a busy team submitting multiple bids at once, that is a meaningful difference.