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About Us
Welcome, Job Seeker

we are

Proactive

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"I have thoroughly enjoyed working for Proactive. I have become a dependable member of the team,  whilst having the flexibility and freedom to work as and when I like." - Ovais A.
"When you join Proactive, you'll meet like-minded people and enjoy your time with the brilliant colleagues you'll be working with." - Said A.
"Since joining Proactive I have been recognised with my skills and management with people which has lead me to be more proactive with roles. A very flexible and accommodating company to work for." - Abdul M.
"During my time at Henley Regatta, I worked with the most brilliant team. I haven't enjoyed providing customer service quite like the time I had during that week." - Said A.
"The wonderful Debby instantly made me feel welcome and spoke to me as if I was already one of her colleagues. The atmosphere was warm and welcoming, I was celebrated for the work I had done and the opportunities ahead of me to develop my skills at Proactive." - Said A.
Our Offering
Complete Staff Resourcing & Roster Management
Award-Winning Customer Experience Design
Transformative Sales Coaching, Training & Accreditation
Game-Changing Philosophy
First and foremost, it's in the name...
Proactive
/prəʊˈaktɪv/
adjective
(of a person or action) creating or controlling a situation rather than just responding to it after it has happened.
"employers must take a proactive approach to equal pay"

People at the Heart of Our Business

We are people in the business of people, no surprise we champion strong humanist values. This means nurturing empathy, genuine understanding and support and recognition of personal success.

Relentless Innovation

We don't rely on divine inspiration for good ideas and we don't set industry benchmarks by accident. We rely on a strict culture of fearlessness, creativity and the celebration of bold new ideas.

Committed to Our Clients' Success

All our clients have seen an uplift in their customer satisfaction scores. Dedicated to uncompromising quality and healthy communication we work in close partnership with you to identify and help you understand your problem and how to improve your metrics.

Your wins are our wins.

We recruit for

Altruism

We value a positive proactive attitude in our interview process. This means identifying emotional intelligence and a natural gift for altruism. When your job is to keep people happy we find a genuine passion for customer experience is more valuable than any set of skills without it.

Our in-house tech team are currently testing the Altruism Index (don't take our word for it but it might just be the next big thing in recruitment disruption...).

Returnship

We consider gaps in CV's opportunities. From parents who have taken career breaks to people who have been disenfranchised through homelessness - we recognise the value in life experience.

Gratitude for a good job results in people who are passionate about doing a good job.

Opportunity

We pay the London Living Wage as a minimum and more where we can. We take pride in helping people find employment they can be passionate about. In fact, most of our HQ team started out in the field. 

The bottom line? If you treat your people well and pay them properly they will treat your customers well. It's as simple as that.

Altruism

We value a positive proactive attitude in our interview process. This means identifying emotional intelligence and a natural gift for altruism. When your job is to keep people happy we find a genuine passion for customer experience is more valuable than any set of skills without it.

Our in-house tech team are currently testing the Altruism Index (don't take our word for it but it might just be the next big thing in recruitment disruption...).
Our Story
Ruth Purim is CEO and Founder of Proactive. She began her career in recruitment as a receptionist, and three years later she set up Proactive on a mission to redefine temporary staffing. Ruth’s business model is based on her intuition that success in the industry would depend upon humanising a transient and often overlooked temporary workforce.

Her business vision is innovative yet simple: be decent with your staff, pay and treat them well, be obsessive about service to clients, and challenge industry norms.
Over a decade later, these values account for a robust business with rapid growth, servicing much of the transportation industry across UK with up to 750 staff. The culture of innovation at Proactive has helped to conceive and spin-off Sirenum, now a leading provider of workforce management software to the temporary staffing industry globally, and has incubated other staffing and technology ventures.

Ruth sits as a panel judge on Cranfields University BGP advising business owners on their growth plans. She has various charitable commitments, a regular public speaker and is a mentor with SmartWorks. She is mother to four young children.
Powerful Technology Keeps Us Ahead of the Curve

Everyone on the line uses our MySirenum app with 24/7 operational support - designed by our sister company and technology partner Sirenum.

Ground Control

Our field staff enjoy unrivalled control over when and where they work with shift hours and locations that suit them. The app helps all of us manage work patterns and preferences making sure everyone is happy.

Our Process

Our digital and operational support system means we are able to scale our capacity and efficiently manage rapidly changing client requirements. This enables our HQ team to get out of the office to spend more time visiting field staff, clients and partners.

Client Peace of Mind

Our clients find peace of mind knowing that last minute shift and requirement changes are always fulfilled. We provide comprehensive managed services with brilliant people every step of the way, no excuses.

The defining measure of our commitment and operational excellence:
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No Shift Left Uncovered
(we can't help but shout about it)
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Our Offering

Events & Crowd Control

We pride ourselves on an excellent track record of providing large and well prepared teams of crowd control hosts.

We are responsible for all the Docklands Light Railway’s event management and routinely scale up to 240 staff members or more for the London Marathon, the Ride London cycle race, events at the 02, etc.

We support our TfL partner Arriva Rail London for all their events such as the Notting Hill Carnival and for customer crowd management at White Hart Lane, Crystal Palace, Watford High Street and Stratford stations.

Our expertise extends to short-term, one-off events such as journey-makers at Twyford for the Henley Royal Regatta and Cheltenham for the Cheltenham Festival.

Most recently we mobilised a team of 24 staff members to provide comprehensive platform support to GWR at Twyford, helping 50,000 additional customers to transfer from mainline trains to the Henley branch line and back again without a single injury or service delay.

For MBNA Thames Clippers, we have responded quickly to short term need on key piers over the peak period in 2019 (Easter, school holidays and mid-summer) and continue to fill hundreds of vacant shifts a month, especially at the weekends and bank holidays.

We were incredibly proud to have the opportunity to support the staffing of the London 2012 Olympics. The vision to deliver a world-class experience involved mobilising 800 customer service professionals at key locations across the Olympic hosting network within incredibly tight deadlines.

Using our proprietary technology platform we were able to identify and filter 6,000 applications in just 90 days resulting in 800 successful placements throughout the UK, or 80,000 shift hours across 30 sites.

Ticketing & Revenue Protection

Ground-breaking teams of multi-skilled and flexible staff with the ability to meet last-minute resourcing gaps.

We have solid experience on the London Overground, where we provide all the gate-line operators on the 24 stations of the London & Chingford, London & Enfield and Churchbury Loop lines.

When these lines were added to the Overground network, almost none of these stations had a gate line and the level of ticket-less travel was running at an unsustainable 24%. We provided the station teams to support London Overground's revenue protection inspectors to run push back and revenue block operations over the three-year gate line building project and now we maintain all their gate lines, delivering a ticket-less travel rate of less than 1.5%.

Our staff members at the other 54 Overground stations are fully trained to operate gate lines and to participate in revenue protection initiatives, as required by Arriva Rail London.  

We are currently developing a ground-breaking team proposal for a client whereby we will develop a dedicated team of ‘revenue protection hosts’ who will start out as gate-line and push back operators and will be trained and developed jointly by us and the T over time to take on ticketing, penalty fare and on-board responsibilities. This team will be a multi-skilled and very flexible resource to complement existing small and stretched team of Revenue Protection Inspectors. We are committed to meeting resourcing gaps to the best of our ability either on a planned or last-minute basis and have built an excellent working relationship with Revenue Protection personnel at our main partner operators.

Our current model of staffing with London Overground is based on multi-skilled individuals who can operate a gate line, run a ticket office position or conduct security and crowd control responsibilities as a platform host – either for whole shifts at a time, or on a split shift or break cover basis.

Sales Coaching

Boosting sales through the unrivalled delivery of fantastic customer service.

Our sales coaching is delivered through bespoke Sales through Service courses. A mixture of workshops and operational sessions designed to help staff and clients both set and achieve sales targets.

The sessions focus on the principles of delivering beautifully crafted customer experiences with a focus on increased sales through the creation and identification of opportunities to productively engage with customers. We recognise everyone is different and everyone will have their own delivery style, for this reason workshops are as much about teaching as they are about understanding personal improvement goals.

The program follows the workshop with operational sessions in coachees' places of work - balancing observation, guided service and target driven conversations to better understand how coachees' personal goals are being reached and how they can overcome perceived obstacles to success.

Feedback from those taking part in the course has overwhelmingly been pride in their employers for making a serious investment in their professional development, demonstrating a genuine sense of being valued as well as an alignment of shared goals. This along with the hard skills and personal coaching has also resulted in an improved focus at work, more powerful sales tools in their arsenal, increased confidence, job satisfaction, retention and ultimately job performance.

Clients have found the sessions valuable for exactly the same reasons; a happier and ultimately better workforce who take greater pride in their job and brand ambassadorship. Clients also value the fact that, due to the mostly operational nature of the coaching sessions, training is minimally disruptive to business as usual.

Sales through Service means the command of presentation, charisma and language to productively engage with customers and either identify opportunities to make a sale or allow customers to feel comfortable enough to want to buy more. Immediate benefits withstanding, we find a better customer experience also goes a way to improving customer loyalty and grass-roots marketing.

Our workshops have been developed as part of our in-house academy and our coaches include veteran customer service professionals with a broad combined experience building, training and managing customer host teams across the transport and hospitality sectors.

Customer Experience Ambassadors

Our unique, award-winning Ambassador teams have transformed the customer experience.

With Southeastern we created and developed the concept of “front-liners with no job description”: highly skilled, committed and capable individuals whose role is simply to seek out where they can assist customers. At key termini such as London Bridge, the Proactive Ambassadors were so successful in transforming customer satisfaction levels that the operator has taken them into direct employment. 

Our Ambassador concept has also been deployed very successfully with operators facing enormous challenges with disruption and/or service suspension. For GTR, for example, we deployed Ambassadors at the main stations affected by the Brighton Mainline Blockade. More than 200 agency staff were taken on to man bus stops, provide information and ensure safe conditions – but it was the Proactive team of 20 Ambassadors who had the key role of ‘roving’ and trouble-shooting as necessary, and supporting the staff at static positions when they became overwhelmed by volume or stuck with problems. They were so successful that the operator kept them on after the blockade to “welcome back” regular customers to the normal service and ensure any feedback was captured and acted up.

It goes without saying that we will provide a dedicated Ambassador team, acting with all operators and with the City Council, to staff the central concourse and be the face of BHM to all members of the public.

Full Staff Accreditation

The Proactive Academy offers full in-house accreditation to suit all our clients needs.

As well as providing bespoke training for clients, we fully train every one of our deployed front-line staff members. This includes customer service training based on World Host principles, crowd control, conflict management, service recovery and a full range of compliance and technical skills such as ticketing, train dispatch, Section XII (subsurface platform) operations, gate line operation, SIA and track access safety management. Our training includes ab initio (pre-deployment) and on-going refresher training, familiarisation and product enhancement training.   
 
Our managed contracts with London Overground and DLR are governed by a strict KPI regime under the auspices of Transport for London. In the case of the Overground, our adherence to the quality standards and commitment to exceeding the requirements of the regime have saved the railway operator, Arriva Rail London, hundreds of thousands of pounds in savings and contributed to their outstanding customer satisfaction and mystery shopper scores. 

Our training team is structured for ‘latent capacity’, meaning that we re-purpose unused elements of the budget into retraining and re-deploying staff, thus keeping churn low. This not only minimises costs but optimises quality: our front-line staff members are more committed and more invested as they are being trained, up-skilled and developed. A result of this approach is that most of our 30-strong HQ team members started out as associate staff members in the field.

We have the resources, accreditation and experience to carry out training for all roles. We have a train-the-trainer model that relieves clients’ managers time and resources and most of our TOC partners prefer this.

Our Philosophy

First and foremost, it's in the name...

Proactive
/prəʊˈaktɪv/
adjective
(of a person or action) creating or controlling a situation rather than just responding to it after it has happened.
"employers must take a proactive approach to equal pay"

People at the Heart of Our Business

We are people in the business of people, no surprise we champion strong humanist values. This means nurturing empathy, active listening and support and recognition of personal success.

Relentless Innovation

We don't rely on divine inspiration for good ideas and we don't set industry benchmarks by accident. We rely on a strict culture of fearlessness, creativity and the celebration of bold new ideas.

Committed to Our Clients' Success

All our clients have seen an uplift in their customer satisfaction scores. Dedicated to uncompromising quality and healthy communication we work in close partnership with you to identify and help you understand your problem and how to improve your metrics.

Your wins are our wins.

Recruiting for Altruism

We value a positive proactive attitude in our interview process and we look for emotional intelligence and a natural gift for altruism.

When your job is to keep the commuters of London happy we find a genuine passion for customer experience is more valuable than any set of skills without it.

Our in-house tech team are currently testing the Altruism Index (don't take our word for it but it might just be the next big thing in recruitment disruption...).

Our Story

Ruth Purim is CEO and Founder of Proactive. She began her career in recruitment as a receptionist, and three years later, she set up Proactive on a mission to redefine temporary staffing. Ruth’s business model was based on her intuition that success in the industry would depend upon humanising a transient and often overlooked temporary workforce.

Her business vision from the outset was innovative yet simple: be decent with the staff, pay and treat them well, be obsessive about service to clients, and challenge industry norms. Over a decade later, these values account for a robust business with rapid growth, servicing much of the transportation industry across UK with 750 staff . The culture of innovation at Proactive helped to conceive and spin off Sirenum, now a leading provider of workforce management software to the temporary staffing industry globally, and has incubated other staffing and technology ventures.

Ruth sits as a panel judge on Cranfields University BGP advising business owners on their growth plans. She has various charitable commitments, a regular public speaker and is a mentor with SmartWorks. She is mother to four young children.

Our Technology

Everyone on the line uses our MySirenum app with 24/7 operational support - designed by our sister company and technology partner Sirenum.

Ground Control

Our ground staff appreciate unrivalled control over when and where they work with shift hours and locations that suit them. The app helps all of us manage work patterns and preferences making sure everyone is happy.

Our Process

Our digital and operational support system means we are able to scale our capacity and efficiently manage rapidly changing client requirements. This enables our HQ team to get out of the office to spend more time visiting ground staff, clients and partners.

Client Peace of Mind

Our clients find peace of mind knowing that last minute shift and requirement changes are always fulfilled. Comprehensive managed services with brilliant people every step of the way, no excuses.

Our Team

HQ

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Control

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Field

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