Repairs Specialist

About The Role
What you can expect from us:

• We offer a competitive salary of £40,650 per annum.
• 32 days annual leave plus bank holidays a total of 40 days paid holiday per annum which is equivalent to 8 weeks.
• Salary Finance - access both short and long terms loans, plus provides access to a savings facility.
• Opportunity to further increase annual leave with service or though the holiday purchase scheme.
• Immediate entry to our Pension scheme (matched contributions up to 10%).
• A great flexible working environment, with a range of family friendly policies.
• Health cash plan with financial benefits and the option to extend to your family. Cover includes dental, optical, physiotherapy, 24HR private GP access and much more.
• Paid leave for absence including sickness, maternity, paternity, and adoption leave.
• Access of up to £150 annually through the 'Learning for life' scheme.
• Access to a wide range of discounts and cash back offers, ranging from retail and automotive to holidays and cycle to work scheme.
• Develop your career with support and access to training and qualifications.
  

About the role
We are seeking to recruit a Repairs Specialist on a 12- month fixed-term contract to ensure our repairs service is delivered to our customers, our properties are well maintained and to contribute to the delivery of neighbourhood plan objectives.

This role is a hybrid role, with a regular requirement to attend our neighbourhood sites across Merseyside to complete surveys and inspections and meet with customers, as well as attending our Watson office in Liverpool.

Key Responsibilities
Customer Service

• Inspect empty properties and ensure work is carried out to bring them up to a lettable standard.
• Respond to customer enquires relating to their home that require a face to face visit.
• Listen to customer views, encouraging resident involvement and make recommendations for how the organisation can respond.
• Deal directly with customers who experience problems with contractor performance, take personal responsibility for ensuring satisfactory resolution.
• Provide advice and assistance to customers to help maintain their homes, deal with condensation, fuel poverty etc.

Contract Management

• Carry out property defect and repair inspections and appropriate diagnosis.
• Issue orders to contractors including prioritising, cost-coding and estimating.
• Ensure all work is to standard, monitoring and controlling the supervision of work in progress as well as adopting a project management approach to the management of properties requiring major works.
• Monitor spend against budgets, reporting any important differences and take action to keep spend within budget.
• Agree variations to work which are cost efficient.
• Ensure colleagues, contractors and customers comply with health and safety, equal opportunity and other statutory guidelines. Ensure that all contracts are specified, ordered and tendered and payments processed.

Skills & Experience Required

• Knowledge and awareness of related housing regulations/ law.
• Experience of contract management and carrying out property inspections.
• Experience of delivering face to face customer service.
• Experience of developing partnership working with support agencies, local authorities and community groups.
• Good understanding of the social, economic and political context in the neighbourhoods in which we operate.
• IT skills - Microsoft office to Intermediate level.
• A Full UK Driving License and access to your own car.

Qualifications
Essential

• Educated to HNC/D Building related studies.

Desirable

• Degree in a related field.

About The Organisation
About Onward
Onward Repairs is the in house repairs and maintenance service for Onward Homes, keeping customers' homes safe, secure and well maintained. Our skilled teams deliver responsive repairs, planned works and voids services, combining high standards, strong teamwork and a customer first approach. We invest in our people and take pride in making a real difference to our communities.
Onward Homes is one of the largest registered providers of social housing in the Northwest, with 35,000 properties across the region.
We believe that everyone deserves a place to call their own, which is why we're committed to building 500 new homes each year. We do more than just provide a roof over our customers' heads, we're here to make a real difference.
In addition to creating positive spaces for our customers we continuously strive to create a positive and progressive workspace to enable our colleagues to achieve their full potential.
We embrace diversity and strive for diverse teams to create an inclusive culture which enables Onward to thrive and be representative of the communities that we serve. We want to ensure that everybody has an opportunity to be part of our recruitment processes and will therefore make reasonable adjustments to accommodate our candidates. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to assist you with our recruitment process via the email address below.
If candidates have any concerns / questions in relation to the role at any stage of the recruitment and selection process they can contact the HR team on and a member of the HR Team will be in touch.