How Network Plus saved over £1 million in agency fees while hiring at scale with Pinpoint
Energy & Utilities
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£1.3 million
saved in agency fees in one year
196
hires in 6 months
3.5 weeks
average time-to-hire
Executive summary
Network Plus is one of the UK's largest utilities and infrastructure contractors. Before Pinpoint, a four-person talent team ran high-volume hiring off spreadsheets, Total Jobs, and Indeed, leaning on agencies to fill the gaps. After moving to Pinpoint, paired with the Appcast integration, the team placed 242 people in their first full year and saved the business around £1.3 million in agency fees. The pace has held: 196 hires and over £1 million saved by June of the following year, with time to hire steady at 3.5 weeks. Just as important to Will Pedigrew and his team, the automation gave them back the hours to stay human with every candidate.
Industry
Energy & Utilities
Location
UK
Headcount
6500+
TA team size
4
About Network Plus
Network Plus is a UK-wide utilities and infrastructure contractor working on behalf of the country's major utilities companies, including National Grid, United Utilities, Severn Trent, and Electricity North West. When you see utilities work happening on the road, more often than not it's a contractor acting on the utility's behalf, and often that contractor is Network Plus. The company specializes in small-scale, high-volume work across water, gas, power, and traffic management, which means it hires constantly and at real scale. Will Pedigrew leads the function as Head of Talent Acquisition, with recruiters split by sector to give each contract a specialist point of contact.
Why Pinpoint?
Network Plus chose Pinpoint because it was built for high-volume hiring and because the team genuinely enjoyed using it. Will had spent years in agency recruitment on clunky systems that "looked like they were running on Windows 95," and the look and feel of the platform mattered to a team that lives in it all day.
"Pinpoint was the clear winner for us. It had all the features we needed, and if I'm spending eight hours a day inside a platform, I want it to be one I actually enjoy using and like the look of."
Will Pedigrew
Head of Talent Acquisition
Use Case
1
Replacing spreadsheets and cutting agency spend
The challenge
Network Plus was growing fast and hiring at serious volume, but the talent team had no dedicated ATS to support it. They ran everything off spreadsheets, Total Jobs, and Indeed, using the job boards as a makeshift system that did nothing once an application landed, and leaned on recruitment agencies to fill the gaps at a high cost. Getting the business to invest was its own hurdle, since the team had managed without one for so long. Will, a self-described ATS skeptic at the time, needed a way to prove the case and move off an approach that couldn't keep up with the company's growth.
The solution
Will built the argument for change by pulling up competitors' career sites, all clearly backed by an ATS, while Network Plus stood out as the one that wasn't. With sign-off secured, the team moved to Pinpoint, replacing siloed spreadsheets and email chains with a single platform for managing hiring end to end. At the same time, Network Plus launched a new careers site, built by Pinpoint, that reflected its people-first culture from the very first click, giving candidates a far stronger first impression while creating a seamless journey into the hiring process.
Behind the scenes, recruitment became centralized, with everything from posting a role to sending offer letters and handling aftercare managed in one place. Will was able to bring hiring in-house, dramatically reducing the team's reliance on recruitment agencies.
£1.3 million
saved in agency fees in the first full year
Two
best-ever recruitment years
Scaled
hiring aross the business
"When I first joined, we didn't have an ATS... looking back, that was crazy. Since implementing Pinpoint, we've done the best recruitment figures we've ever had as a business, two years running. That's not a coincidence."
Will Pedigrew
Head of Talent Acquisition
Use Case
2
Hiring at volume without losing the human touch
The challenge
With 109 live roles across four recruiters and over 26,000 applications since adopting Pinpoint, the team was always at risk of drowning in admin. Manually booking interviews, copying and pasting scripts into every invite, and rejecting at that volume was slow and grim work. At the same time, Will was wary of hiring becoming robotic, especially for graduates and younger candidates who can go from application to assessment day without ever speaking to a real person.
The solution
To keep up with the organization's continuous growth, the team leant on Pinpoint's automation to handle repetitive, administrative work. At the same time, interview self-scheduling allowed candidates book their own slots, while candidate tags turned rejections into a single click, and screening questions filtered for essentials like a driving license or visa sponsorship before an application moved forward.
With that time back, the team was able to layer the human touch back on top of their hiring process, following up every booked interview with a personal phone call.
3.5 weeks
average time-to-hire
Increased
team efficiency with automated screening
Personalized
follow-up for every scheduled interview
“For my team in particular, Pinpoint’s interview scheduling has been revolutionary. It's incredibly good.”
Will Pedigrew
Head of Talent Acquisition
Use Case
3
Lifting candidate quality and quantity with the Appcast integration
The challenge
Sourcing had long been a struggle. After the company’s Indeed account was blocked, Network Plus spent a rough year leaning on Total Jobs, and the business had grown used to advertising within a set budget. Will wanted a single way to push a role out to multiple job boards and bring better candidates through the door, especially for hard-to-fill utilities roles.
The solution
Will got Appcast signed off alongside Pinpoint, and the two work hand in hand. Posting to Appcast is a single click when a role goes live, and every application flows back into Pinpoint in one place, with the source tracked automatically. The integration runs quietly in the background, doing the sourcing legwork without adding steps for the team.
Higher
quality and quantity of applicants
Stronger
candidates for hard-to-fill roles
Simplified
sourcing with one-click job distribution
“Pinpoint and Appcast are like driving a Ferrari compared to the busted-out Ford Fiesta we were driving before. I’d be highly surprised if any business that used both didn’t see the quality and the quantity of applications improve.”
Will Pedigrew
Head of Talent Acquisition
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