We are a public sector consultancy based in London, Cardiff and The Hague. Many of us started our lives in public service. We have experienced our clients’ challenges first-hand; we admire the work they do and continue to work in public services because we care about making a positive impact on society.
We pioneered the use of user-centred and agile approaches to change in local government. We try to understand people’s needs by spending time with them, and we find out what best meets those needs by testing new approaches in practice and not just in theory.
We think we’re doing a good job. Despite being significantly smaller than our competitors, we’ve been listed as one of the UK Financial Times' top consultancies in the public and social sector for six years running. We were voted for by our clients and peers.
A full-time career consists of 2,000 working weeks. We believe that how we spend this time is one of the most important moral decisions of our lives.
Everyone who works at Basis has what Rutger Bregman calls ‘moral ambition’; the will to make the world a much better place.
We are driven by a need to make the challenging moments in people's lives easier. We exist to solve messy problems in society and to help our clients do the best work of their lives.
Consulting: We bring together teams of people to understand the challenges they are facing. Together, we design and test solutions with service users and put the best solutions into practice. All our work is aimed at making services better for people, faster to operate and cheaper to run. We use agile approaches that aim to make change happen quickly, and always put people at the centre of our work.
Training: Our training draws on learning from a range of disciplines including Agile, Service Design, Organisational Development, LEAN and systems thinking. Our best-known programme is the Agile Master in Public Services, which has an alumni group of over 1,000 and a thriving community of practice to support their ongoing development.
Facilitation: Whether in the room or online, we create the space needed for people to wrestle with complex problems and make meaningful progress. In addition to running workshops with our clients, we’ve designed and run unconferences, GovCamps and global events for as many as 500 people.
We are humble
We enable clients to deliver results. We revel in their success and don’t steal the limelight. Credit for our work comes through them.
We are helpful
We aim to be helpful in every interaction. We add as much value as we can, even before we start getting paid. We do this by sharing insight, recommending tools, challenging perceptions and stimulating conversations.
We are humorous
This isn’t about being purposefully funny or about telling jokes. Being humorous for us is about making use of stories, being self-deprecating and using language that is informal and more human. More than most, we are happy to take a risk and have a laugh with clients. They are normal people, just like us.
We’re looking for a consultant with at least 2 years experience to support public sector, charitable and Non-Governmental Organisations to help them make progress on their messiest challenges.
As part of the role, you'll work on a range of projects helping leaders and front-line workers to design and test solutions that make their services better for citizens and sustainable to run.
You’ll also play an important role in helping us to develop our work and our thinking. This could involve helping to design new products and services, organising events, contributing to proposals for new work or helping to spread the word about the impact we’re having in practice.
You’ll also spend lots of time developing your skills and coaching others to do the same. There are lots of opportunities to join our training programmes, to learn from others and to give and receive feedback frequently.
We’re looking for someone who has practical experience in implementing change using iterative and user-centred approaches. This doesn’t necessarily need to be within the public sector, but you must be driven by a need to make a positive impact on society.
We are looking for lots of different skills and would be keen to speak with people from a range of backgrounds including scrum masters, agile coaches, management consultants, change managers, transformers and government project managers.
We are particularly interested in people who have demonstrated a curiosity and a drive to learn new skills in a broad range of areas in their personal and professional lives.
To be successful in this role you’ll need some of the following experience and capabilities:
Making progress on messy problems requires an understanding of the ‘WHAT’ and the ‘HOW’. If our focus is balanced too far towards the ‘what’ we identify the potential for great impact, but might never achieve it. If we focus solely on the ‘how’, we get fast change with limited impact.
Our approach balances the what and the how to get impactful change, quickly. Many methods fall under our umbrella and people at Basis have different areas of specialism, these can be seen in our improvement model. We don’t expect you to know about or be an expert in all of these approaches. However, we’re looking for someone who would consider themselves to be really capable in some of them and is keen to learn the others over time.
Salaries for the role start at £30,000 and increase to £43,000 for those with more experience.
We offer a minimum of 24 days' holiday.
You will be able to access all our outstanding accredited training and will receive a £500 annual training budget to spend on whatever development opportunities you think are going to be most beneficial to you.
On-the-job mentoring from one of our Directors
As part of the role, you’ll buddy up with one of our Directors. You’ll work alongside them on a range of projects and benefit from frequent mentoring to help you speed up your learning journey. Periodically you’ll get to change the Director you work with to enable you to learn from people with different working styles and specialisms.
Flexible working
Basis is designed to be a happy place to work, we’re not perfect but we work hard to improve things every day.
Most of our work is done remotely. We’re global experts in remote working and asynchronous collaboration and we try to take our own medicine. Although we aim to meet up as a whole team at least once a month, we stay connected through a virtual HQ. You can read about what it’s like to join the team and work remotely from Aaron, our most recent hire who blogged about his experience recently.
Some of our clients like us to work with them periodically on-site. This does mean that some travel and in-person work is part of our role. Meeting people in person is great for building relationships and we love it. But we do try to ensure people have lots of flexibility and can work, for the most part, in whichever location makes the most sense to them. At times during the year, some of our team members even work in different countries and where possible, we try to make that work.
Most of our work is with Local Authorities. We often work with vulnerable people, children and schools and will perform an enhanced DBS check as a condition of any job offer we make you. If you have any concerns you can speak to us confidentially and without judgement.
We’re trying hard to increase the diversity of our team. We need to better represent the communities we serve and at the moment we’re falling short. We particularly want to hear from people who share our ‘moral ambition’ to make the world a much better place, who’ve had a range of different life experiences and who come from diverse backgrounds and underrepresented groups.
We’ll inform all candidates of the interview process ahead of time and are very happy to make accommodations to best suit the needs and strengths of each individual.
Please send us whatever you feel is necessary to help us understand your experience and skill set. A CV isn’t essential, we’re open to creative responses.
If you would like to send us a CV, we operate a blind sifting process. So before you send this through, please remove your name, university details and anything else you’d like to remain anonymous. The focus of our recruitment is on your experience and skills and we are trying to remove bias as far as possible from our hiring process. This isn’t perfect, but we’re trying to improve.
Send your application to comms@basis.co.uk.
Closing date: 12th of April
Interviews completed by: 26th of April
