This Guide Provides an Overview of the System Administration Features Within NHS Jobs

System Administration Overview

About this Guide

This guide provides an overview of the system administration features within NHS Jobs.

The features described in this guide are only available to system administrators.

About the Role

The System Administrator role is the most important role within NHS Jobs. The system administrator has the highest level of permissions, enabling them to set up and manage many aspects of how NHS Jobs is used within their organisation.

To ensure that there is coverage at all times and allowing for people being out of the office, for whatever reason, each organisation should have a minimum of two system administrators set up. Please note that the system will only allow a maximum of three system administrators, as agreed at the service definition phase.

In addition to setting up and managing a number of items, the system administrators are expected to provide initial NHS Jobs support to their organisation’s users. The NHS Jobs Helpdesk will support organisations using NHS Jobs, but there is an expectation that contacts with the Helpdesk will be from the system administrators only and not from the users directly. Again this was defined in the service definition phase. If this is likely to be a problem for your organisation, or if it turns out to present difficulties, please contact the NHS Jobs Service Manager through the Helpdesk, as there are some options for support that can be discussed.

Overview

An NHS Jobs system administrator can set-up and manage:

Accounts for users in their organisation
Standard information that is displayed to jobseekers on the ‘Employer Details’ page, and on job adverts.
Standard letters, emails and reference request forms
Additional questions for application forms, and ‘pre-application’ questions
Templates for ‘score cards’
Templates for vacancies
‘Job packs’ and associated documents and links
Department names to be used for reporting purposes
KPI time periods
Publishing paths for vacancies.

System administrators can also view audit trail information for users within their organisation. This information is automatically recorded by NHS Jobs.

All of these features are found in the Admin section – click on ‘Admin’ on the left hand navigation.

Many of these features are covered in separate guides, as listed here.

Managing Employer Accounts

Employer details

KPI management

Div/Dept for reporting

Secondary employers

Administering User Accounts

User accounts

Role management

Managing Vacancy Information

Documents and links

Job packs

Role documents

Vacancy templates

Application Form Options

Application form additional questions

Pre-application questions

Managing Restricted Accounts

Restricted accounts

Affected by change accounts

The remaining features are included in this guide.

HR Admin permission

Within larger organisations the system administrators may decide to involve other users in some aspects of the system administration. A sub-set of the features can be managed by other users working in support of the system administrators. Such users should be assigned the additional permission of “HR Admin”.

Users with the “HR Admin” permission will be able to manage the following features, in addition to the system administrators:

Restricted accounts

Affected by change accounts

Job packs

Documents and links

Role document library

Publishing paths

Stored emails and letters

You have the ability to set-up your own standard emails and letters which can be sent to applicants when appropriate. This is done from the ‘Stored Emails and Letters’ page, which is shown below:

There is one email and one letter that come as standard with the system by default. It is not possible to edit or delete these.

In order to personalise your letters and emails they need to contain ‘placeholders’ that are automatically updated by the system when the correspondence is sent out. For example , there is a ‘placeholder’ for an applicant’s title, and another for an applicant’s surname, so the system will automatically replace those with the real applicant’s details, such as Dr Morton, or Mrs Jones. The full list of ‘placeholders’ is available via an online link when you create a new email or letter.

To check that you have used the right ‘placeholders’, you click the ‘Preview’ link by a letter or email, and the system will show you what the document would look like with dummy values for the ‘placeholders’.

When you first create an email or letter on NHS Jobs it exists in a draft form that cannot be used by recruiters. You have to go through a second step of previewing the draft and ‘making it live’ in order that it can be used. The green ticks in the picture above show the emails and letters that have been made ‘live’ for use by recruiters.

Reference Requests

You can set-up a template for references via the Reference Request Templates page under the Admin menu, which is shown below.

There are two templates, one for medical and one for non-medical references. When you create a template (as shown in the screenshot below), you have the ability to include up to 20 questions. You can also include default instructions for referees, which a recruiter can edit, if necessary, when they issue the reference request.

Score Cards

In NHS Jobs it is possible, when reviewing applications for shortlisting, to score how well applicants meet the requirements of a particular position. The system includes a standard score card, but you have the ability to set-up customised score cards for your organisation via the ‘Score Card Templates’ page, which is shown below.

A score card contains a number of sections or headings that should be related to the person specification. The reviewers will provide a score for each of these headings when assessing an application. Within each section on the score card there can be a number of criteria to look for within the application form. These criteria are simply short reminders for the requirements within the person specification. As the score card is only used for reviewing applications, the criteria listed should only be those that can be assessed in an application form.

The standard score card cannot be edited or deleted.

You have the options to select one of the score cards to be used by default (with recruiters having the option to override the default at the time they create a vacancy), or you can select an option to have no default score card.

When you click to add a new score card template you should note the guidance about it, at the top of the page as shown below:

You need to provide each score card a name, ideally one which reflects its purpose so that recruiters can easily ascertain if it is relevant.

You can have up to six score-able sections within the score card, each of which can be given a weighting. In the example shown above, the section headed ‘experience’ has been given a lower weighting than the section headed ‘qualifications’.

If you require fewer sections you simply leave the extra sections blank.

For each section you have the ability to add up to five ‘criteria’, which are intended to provide guidance on how to score the section.

The page for editing a template is very similar to the page for creating a new one. Note that when you change a template it will not affect vacancies that have been published in the past; it will only affect vacancies published from that point onwards.

Publishing paths

When a recruitment officer publishes a job advert on NHS Jobs the following publishing options are available:

Internal - means that the job advert can only be seen by internal applicants
Local restricted - means that the job adverts can only be seen by applicants identified in an organisation’s list of restricted accounts
Group restricted - means that the job advert can be seen by applicants identified on the local lists of a number of organisations that have been grouped together for the purpose.
National restricted - means that the job advert can be seen by applicants on any restricted list across NHS Jobs.
Public - means that the job advert can be viewed by all job-seekers.

In addition there is the option to also use a specific ‘Publishing path’. ‘Publishing paths’ are pre-defined sequences of different publishing options that are triggered by the passage of time. NHS Jobs has two which are:

Internal Publishing Path – a vacancy starts off as ‘Internal’ but is later made a ‘Public’ vacancy.
Restricted Publishing Path- a vacancy starts as Local restricted, is later moved to Group restricted, and is then moved to National restricted, and finally is made Public

As a system administrator you can set the time periods that elapse between the different stages of the publishing paths. This feature is available via the ‘Publishing Paths’ page under Admin in the left navigation menu. The screenshot below shows a ‘Restricted publishing path’ where vacancies move from ‘Local’ to ‘Group restricted’ after five days, and so on.

Audit Search

As a system administrator you also have access to an audit tool, available via the ‘Audit search’ option under Admin in the left navigation menu.

The ‘Audit search’ form enables you to perform searches on a subset of the audit records recorded by NHS Jobs that relates to the activities of users within your organisation only.

You can perform a search using date, user email address, application reference number or vacancy reference number. You can also search for audit records relating to specific actions, by selecting the appropriate action from the ‘Action’ drop-down.

A summary list of activities recorded by the audit system is presented to you, with links to view more details on each action.

The results of the audit search can be downloaded as a CSV file for further investigation or as needed.