Enabling the NHS to transform its online recruitment service

Challenge

The NHS is the single biggest employer in the UK. In 2018, the BSA began developing NHS Jobs to centralise the range of different job processes that were used across the healthcare system and make a new digital service for handling jobs that is GDS compliant.

Our approach

Working with our partner Difrent, we joined the NHS Jobs team in order to build an Extreme Programming (XP) Agile team that could work within a larger 30 person team. To start with, we had a small backlog of features to ship and set about deploying code to put in front of customers as soon as possible.

This included new pages that were released in just one week during the pandemic lockdown, enabling 5000 employers on a private beta to mark jobs as COVID-19 related. We also added localisation to the public-facing application with a Welsh language translation and have been working on elastic search functionality that is ready for use when needed in the future.

Results we achieved together

As well as shipping features at speed, we are adding capabilities to an expansion team responsible for live support that is made up of apprentices and non-technical staff. This has involved mentoring and pair programming to improve skills and processes across the full engineering stack, testing and DevOps, so they can deploy code quickly and introduce automated testing.

XP Agile team within larger team
Rapid release of new features
Localisation for Welsh language
Elastic search functionality
Upskilling of expansion team
Apprentices and non-technical staff trained
Mentoring and pair programming
Full stack, testing and DevOps skills

NHS BSA is an increasingly data-driven organisation, delivering services across the NHS and, together, NHS Digital and NHS BSA are the digital train tracks on which NHS technology runs.
Matt Hancock
Health Secretary