When the Paralympic Games end on 9 September, the majority of staff at LOCOG (the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games) will be out of a job, but an initiative known as The Network is giving them the opportunity to find work elsewhere.

The Network is operated on Employer Connections software and the company’s head of marketing Ben Wright tells Recruiter that it hopes to have 3,000 individuals signed up by 9 September.

It currently has over 2,500 registered candidates and nearly 250 companies have registered an interest, with over 150 already signed up, Wright adds. A LOCOG spokesperson confirms that while the organisation has around 6,000 staff, only those who had been employed by it before 31 March were eligible to participate - which is something approaching 3,500.

The companies invited to be part of The Network include suppliers to the Games such as recruitment partner Adecco, oil and gas partner BP and retailer John Lewis, as well as the organisers of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and Rio’s 2016 Summer Olympics, and other companies screened by LOCOG.

Wright explains that part of LOCOG’s desire to put together such a scheme was that it “didn’t want people to be looking for a job while they should be concentrating on the Olympics”.

As chief executive of Employer Connections Peter Ward previously told Recruiter, with The Network live for nearly a year to date, some companies have put up dummy jobs on the system, allowing people to apply for them and be pre-screened, so they will be eligible to take up similar roles when they become available further down the line.

LOCOG also emphasised the diversity of candidates – as Recruiter reported in its February edition, diversity was a key strand in the recruitment process to LOCOG for Adecco, which guaranteed candidates with a disability who were eligible but unsuccessful in applying for LOCOG jobs a job interview with Adecco itself.