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Danielle Hendy
Engagement Executive
The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) wanted to buy a new job service to help deliver their vision of:
The NHS is the world’s 5th largest employer. The existing NHS Jobs service handled 4 million applications a year for more than 380,000 vacancies. But the recruitment experience wasn’t user-friendly for job applicants and hiring managers.
We joined the project in discovery, as NHSBSA’s strategic transformation partner, to help define the problem they needed to solve and ensure the right solution.
We supplied a team of experts:
Our team worked in partnership with NHSBSA and other supplier teams to design, build and deliver the service through discovery, alpha and private beta – passing each assessment.
Through discovery, we identified that buying and customising a new platform would be too costly, and that the better solution was to build from scratch.
During this project, we:
We also engaged with project teams on the DFE teachers service and civil service jobs, looking to see what knowledge we could gain from those services.
Our new service is now in public beta, and is being used by more than 6,500 GPs and trusts across the UK.
To help NHSBSA develop their internal capabilities, our specialists worked alongside NHSBSA staff to transfer project knowledge and new skills.
We did this by:
This part of the project is all about defining the problem you need to solve.
To do this, we:
From this, we carried out user research to understand the needs of job applicants and hiring managers. We conducted semi-structured user interviews, co-design workshops, and usability tests of the existing service.
We finished discovery with:
This phase is all about trying out different solutions to the problems you learnt about during discovery.
We did this by:
And to prepare to move into beta we:
Beta is where you take your best idea from alpha and start building it for real, making sure that the solution you’ve chosen works as well as possible.
We did this by:
Our validated solutions were turned into user stories for development throughout Beta. Our “definition of done” for user story development contained the 14 GDS service standards to ensure our work complied ahead of the assessment.
During public beta, we collected feedback from users of the service, and used this alongside web analytics to help us continuously iterate the service based on emerging needs.
During this project, there were challenges around remote working for the NHS team we worked with, as well as some much needed additions to the service to respond to NHS COVID efforts.
The NHS needed to recruit a lot of people fast into numerous front-line roles such as nurses and doctors, as well as staff to administer vaccines.
People wanted to get involved during the crisis with GPs coming out of retirement and trained staff who had moved onto other careers wanting to return. The NHS jobs platform needed a way to recruit these users quickly, which was a challenge with so many staff now working remotely.
We created a new feature for the service which categorised these roles clearly, and allowed hiring managers to add listings for COVID related jobs quickly and efficiently. Alongside this, we also shared our knowledge of remote working. As a remote-first company, Difrent has vast experience of working remotely, onboarding remote teams, and keeping up efficiency, as well as looking after our employees mental and physical wellbeing during remote working.
Added a covid question to the create listing journey so that an employer could quickly and easily mark a job as being a covid related job.
Prominent signposting was added to the existing Jobs site, search and job detail pages to help people find Covid roles.
Working in partnership with the NHSBSA, we have:
We improved the journey for both hiring managers using the internal service, and candidates looking for jobs, including improvements to:
One of our key successes was moving away from the old solution, which was a third-party API. This wasn’t working and had become an issue for all users. We created an in house solution to replace this which worked much better for the service.
The new service was built and designed using accessible code and is accessible for users with access needs including those using screen reading software. It also works for mobile users, and has an assisted digital solution for users who have difficulty using digital services.
Darren Curry
Chief Digital Officer at NHSBSA
This work has been acknowledged by the Leading Healthcare Awards as Highly Commended in 2020 and achieving Overall Winner in 2021 for our Partnership with NHS BSA.
“I think the smile says it all, delighted to be the bride this time around and so god damn proud of the team!” Rachel Murphy FBCS
Please leave us your details and a member of our team will get back to you as soon as possible.
Danielle Hendy
Engagement Executive