Case Study: Serco Transforms Job Coaching With Content Guru

Serco employs 50,000 people across 35 countries, with a revenue of over $7 billion. It provides business process outsourcing.

It has supported the Department of Work and Pensions Restart contract since it began in 2021. Participants on its Restart Scheme are given up to a year of tailored job coach support to help them find sustainable employment after they become unemployed.

If participants find meaningful work within six weeks of entering a Restart coaching programme, it drastically reduces the likelihood of them needing long-term benefits payments.

Challenges

Serco receives referrals for the Restart Scheme via Jobcentre Plus (JCP) Work Coaches. The contract rewards Serco for getting people into employment for 90 days and earning over £4,300 during that period.

A critical part of the Restart service is the support that Serco delivers to participants via their team of job coaches.

The job coaches provide comprehensive assistance and training/learning opportunities to participants which is delivered in a series of regular one-to-one meetings in person and on calls.

The main value is derived from helping them set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely) objectives, as well as assisting with the production of key assets, such as covering letters and resumes for job applications.

As much of the job-coaching role involves talking extensively with participants, large tranches of the process require note-taking by hand and then typing them up in Serco’s system of record.

This makes it hard for job coaches to focus on providing a personalized service, because they have to write notes during the one-to-one sessions.

Information for things like resumes is often not comprehensive and completion is delayed when information cannot be gleaned.

Solutions

Content Guru worked with Serco to implement the real-time transcription and summarization (RTAS) solution to help its job coaches deliver a better experience for Restart scheme participants.

It collaborated with Serco to produce the templates for all the different outputs required, along with the data required to populate them.

Instead of job coaches manually writing notes and then typing up outputs, RTAS now transcribes the interview conversations and then uses generative AI to automatically create the necessary outputs, such as SMART action plans and resumes.

The job coach simply reviews the outputs for quality post-interview and then they are immediately available for use.

Since going live with RTAS to record the Restart participants’ input, Serco is saving 20 minutes in post-interview wrap activity. This automation is leading to higher quality and throughput, so Serco is expanding its service.

Results

Using RTAS, Serco has seen massive efficiency results. Job coaches are seeing 20 minutes saved in post-interview wrap activity.

As a result of saving such large amounts of time, the job coaches can conduct more interviews and get through more cases (up to 3x the previous level).

The quality, detail, and consistency of action plans have seen a marked improvement within this time saving, as these are automatically created based on the interview transcripts.

A key benefit of RTAS is that the job coaches can pay more attention on the individual in the coaching process, as they no longer have to type up notes or write things by hand.

As well as this interpersonal benefit, participants can get the outputs (such as SMART action plans, cover letters and resumes) put to use immediately, rather than potentially taking weeks, reducing the time they will be out of work.

Because of the improvements, the Serco service is now the number one provider to the Restart programme for quality and audit measures, and is therefore is being rolled out to more JCPs.

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