Sparkways leverages SmartMatch to find their dream candidates

About Sparkways

Sparkways is a not-for-profit early education provider that empowers Melbourne’s children and young people. With over 45 services ranging from kindergartens and early learning centres through to mentoring, the Sparkways team is dedicated to helping every child and young person reach their full potential. 

There’s no denying that the team at Sparkways make it what it is today, and that’s why hiring the right people to bring on board is so important. However, when it comes to finding educators and support staff with the right skills and experience, it can be a time-consuming challenge. 

Ash-lee Kingsberry, Talent Acquisition Coordinator at Sparkways shares her experience using SmartMatch to fill open roles, plus shares how she personally leveraged SmartMatch as a candidate to find the role she’s currently in. 

Quality candidates from SmartMatch 

Needing to fill a Diploma Educator role, Ash-lee initially turned to job boards to source candidates, however struggled with the quality that came through. Seeking alternative ways, she turned to SmartMatch to tap into a broader talent pool. 

Through SmartMatch, Ash-lee was able to access a pool of candidates actively looking for roles in the early childhood education sector. This proved extremely valuable by allowing her to connect with candidates who had the exact qualifications and experience she required. 

“SmartMatch was great because we weren’t getting the calibre of people on traditional job boards.  The candidate we found on SmartMatch met all the requirements of what we were looking for and is now working at the centre.”

Once she connected with the candidate, the process was started and completed in record time.

“I contacted her straight away and had an interview organised within a few days. I would say the turnaround for hiring was about one week.”

Save time and effort when recruiting

Beyond improving candidate quality, SmartMatch has also helped streamline Sparkways’ recruitment process by removing the time-consuming parts of hiring. 

“SmartMatch screens the resume and gives us a small summary about their experience, plus why they may be suited to the role. This saves so much time because we don’t have to go through the resumes and decide that for ourselves.” 

Additionally, SmartMatch doesn’t just find candidates; it engages with them as well. Top candidates are notified about the job they are matched with and given an opportunity to learn more about the organisation and role. They can also express interest in the role, answer pre-screening questions and even send a personalised video introduction. 

The ability to see interested candidates has proved particularly useful for Ash-lee.

“I do like that SmartMatch sends candidates the job and they can indicate if they’re interested.  When I see interested candidates, I jump straight on them immediately.”  

“I personally found SmartMatch a much more efficient tool compared to SEEK Talent Search as the job is already provided to the candidate. Candidates can also opt-in if they are interested. This makes it so much easier because I don’t have to send them the job after reviewing their resume and use credits to do this.”

Finding her dream job with the help of SmartMatch

Interestingly, SmartMatch isn’t just a tool for Sparkways to find top talent, it also helped Ash-lee find her dream role at the organisation. 

Ash-lee found her current role with the help of SmartMatch on the Swag jobs platform. While on parental leave, she wasn’t looking to return to work so soon, but was casually browsing jobs on Swag. A SmartMatch notification alerted her to a job opening at Sparkways that perfectly aligned with what she wanted her next role to be.

“I was on maternity leave and I wasn’t looking to return to work for a few months. But when I saw the job ad, I thought, ‘that’s literally my dream job.’”

Finding the right role can be challenging for specialised positions like Ash-lee’s – and SmartMatch helped her do just that.

“Especially for a role like mine, it’s specific”, she explained. “If I look under the education sector, I might end up with all the education roles I wasn’t looking for. But if I look under recruitment, it would have been hard to sift through all the roles to find one that matched what I sought.”

Finding it through traditional job boards would have been a lot harder for such a niche role like what Ash-lee was looking for.

“I wouldn’t have found the job if it wasn’t for SmartMatch. The whole application process was pretty much done in just a click of a button for me.”

“The job was sent to me and I didn’t have to do the job hunting. For someone who’s looking for work, that’s very attractive.”

The future of hiring with SmartMatch

SmartMatch is one that Sparkways has added to their hiring toolkit and they can’t wait to hire more people with it.

“I’ve just put a new job out and I can already see some people that SmartMatch has indicated are interested. So there’s already three or four qualified people sitting for me to contact. I do think it will be very helpful for us.’

SmartMatch is an exclusive feature for Employment Hero users. If you’d like to explore how Employment Hero can transform your HR and payroll processes so you can focus back on doing what you do best, connect with one of our business specialists today.