I’m slightly afraid to mention the word “Brexit”, but I’m going to, as it’s all change as far as finding UK recruitment tenders goes! Since 1st January 2021, OJEU no longer publishes new UK tenders and this function has been taken over by the Government’s new “Find a Tender” service for high value contracts (usually above £118k). If you pay for a tender notification service, this should not make much difference to you as your provider will use this as their new source of UK tenders, however, if you look for them manually yourself and previously used TED (or Tenders Electronic Daily) this service will not longer be relevant to UK opportunities.
Find Public Sector Recruitment Tenders in the UK
You can, however, find recruitment tenders for central government, local government, councils, NHS, utilities, housing associations, police etc by using government portals for the relevant UK country as follows:
- England (tenders above £10k contract value with non-devolved bodies) – Contracts Finder
- Scotland – Public Contracts Scotland
- Wales – Sell2Wales
- Northern Ireland – eSourcingNI
Opportunities covering more than one country or the whole UK should be advertised on each national portal and you can register on these portals free of charge, however, you may find that some are easier to navigate than others.
To make life as easy as possible, we’ve recently put together a free list of the main Government recruitment contracts on our website covering all sectors (medical, clinical and NMNC), together with details of contract start and end dates, a breakdown of the lots/services covered under each and in some cases a link to the particular procurement hub’s site so you can read more about the particular framework/contract.
What’s more, we’ve also got a free tender notification service where we post opportunities that we believe may be of interest to our recruitment clients. If you register for this, you will receive an automated email detailing the opportunity. I’m afraid there are no filters on this so you can’t choose which tenders you receive, however, they will all relate to recruitment and are quick and easy to delete if they’re not relevant to you. Unfortunately, we don’t guarantee to post every single tender (particularly the low value opportunities), so to be safe you may wish to do your own searches or pay for a notification service in addition to this.
Finding Private Sector Recruitment Tenders
Private sector tenders are altogether more difficult to find as there is no obligation for private sector organisations to advertise their opportunities and there is no central repository for you to search for them. Why not create your own procurement pipeline by researching the organisations you would like to do business with and building networks with key decision makers within procurement to establish:
- How they purchase recruitment services
- If they use a formal procurement channel (e.g. if they have a PSL).
- Who is responsible for managing this
- When they are likely to go out to tender for these services in the future
- How your business could be included in any such bid opportunities
Connect with these people on LinkedIn and use your recruitment software to schedule calls/emails to ensure you remain in contact to increase your chances of being invited to participate in future bids and tenders.
