• What’s involved with this role:

To provide a customer-oriented housing debt collection and advice service to a "patch" of around 1,250 secure and non-secure Council tenants and leaseholders.

Your duties will include:

(i) Communicating with tenants and leaseholders in a customer-oriented manner, whether by personal interview (at the office or in the customer's home), telephone or correspondence, using Plain English;

(ii) Promoting the take-up of welfare benefits, having regard to tenants' financial and domestic circumstances, and providing tenants with provisional benefit assessments using the `Benefactor’ software or similar calculator;

(iii) Promoting the take up of rent collection initiatives and administering direct debit and bankers order payment procedures;

(iv) Using the rent accounting system to monitor and control current tenants' rent arrears, implementing appropriate and timely action to recover arrears, including visiting tenants in their homes and recommending suitable cases for legal action to the Income Manager;

(v) Serving Notices on tenants;

(vi) Making affidavits and presenting evidence at Court in respect of tenancies on the "patch", as required;

(vii) Drafting reports for the Housing Sub-Committee and/or for senior officers seeking authority to evict a tenant because of rent arrears;

(viii) Instigating action under the rechargeable works policy to ensure that costs are recovered for repairs that are the tenant’s responsibility, such as damage to Council property;

(ix) Liaising with the Repairs, Tenancy, Caretaking, Customer Services, and Programmed Works teams, and with sheltered housing wardens, on relevant matters;

(x) Emptying meters of tokens and keeping associated records.


IMPORTANT notes:

1) At the risk of stating the obvious, our clients are looking for CVs that match the “Essentials” listed below.

2) We recommend that you consider taking a couple of minutes extra to submit a suitably ‘tailored’ CV* for each role that you apply for, listing those of your key skills, experience and qualifications that relate specifically to this vacancy somewhere near the top of your CV.

3) If you hold a CRB check or security clearance it is always worth stating this prominently on your CV.

4) Please bear in mind that local authority clients are generally prevented (by their own systems) from seeing your covering letter. On that basis it pays to ensure that your CV works as a standalone document.

• “Essentials” for inclusion within on your CV: Give yourself the best chance of getting appointed by ensuring that your CV shows the following PROMINENTLY:

- minimum of 2 years housing related debt recovery experience within a local authority or housing association
- Enhanced CRB check in place
- MS Word, Excel and Outlook

• Other useful, but non-essential, details to include on your CV, if applicable:

- any relevant qualifications held or being studied for

• Client: Local Authority

• Division: Housing

• Anticipated Length of Assignment: Temporary role for 6 months initially, though considered likely to be extended.

• Hours per week: 36, Monday – Friday, normal working hours

We are sorry, but due to high volumes we are not able to respond to unsuccessful applications. You will hear from us by email if we are able to take your CV forward to the next stage.

Please note that we check all ads at least once per day to ensure that the underlying roles remain live.

*If you wish to send a CV through to us that has been modified for this particular role then, as an alternative to applying on line, you may email it to jobs@triumph.gb.com, but you must always remember to quote the reference number for the job in question, without which we will be unable to match your CV to the vacancy, given the number of applications that we receive each day

Triumph Consultants Limited: www.triumph.gb.com