A Hiring Spike - A Pragmatic Approach

When a medium-sized industrial solutions company achieved an order book and pipeline of projects way beyond its projections, it faced a dilemma that any growing business would envy. The product was cutting edge - building bespoke solutions for use in hostile environments over land and sea. The technology required unique skills, as each and every build was a ‘one-off’ - relying on the problem solving skills of some of the greatest engineering minds from across Europe.

To respond to larger scale projects and framework partnerships, they needed to hire a team of 12 engineers at differing levels of experience from multiple disciplines, without delay. Prior to working with us, the client relied on a local PSL of recruitment suppliers, with very mixed results. The hiring managers found the existing process ineffective - overwhelmed with inadequate CVs which were time-consuming to analyse and rarely came close to the very niche skills requirements. They had lost faith in recruitment - so the time came to do things differently.

This medium-sized entity had a small recruitment team, resourced perfectly for ’business as usual’ staff turnover, but not for special projects and future growth - so with these new project wins they needed a commercially viable way to respond to the spike in hiring.

We were able to take the pain out of their day-to-day work by acting as their ‘Recruitment Process Outsourced (RPO)’ partner. The advantages of this were:

• Creating candidate attraction packs to market the roles - not the classic job description approach

• Applying ‘retained search’ style headhunting techniques to each and every position

• Insights and referrals from our network of industry sources across Europe - the alumni of the very best engineering schools

• Creation of a bespoke technical assessment on engineering principles

• Design of a behavioural assessment, aligned to the vision of the Executive Team for the growing business

• A six month assignment to source 12 roles, each with shortlists delivered within 6 weeks, resulting in 12 new members of the engineering team

• 3 days per week present onsite - an opportunity for knowledge transfer to the in-house recruitment partners in conducting proactive headhunting and talent pipelining - which would be the legacy of our assignment

• Our ‘Every Search Matters’ ethos applied to every position

…all positions were successfully filled, and additionally the results of our technical and behavioural profiling meant that the Executive Team could start to see who had the potential for future technical leadership, based on the results of our detailed assessment discussions.