An International business that design, build and supply large capital machinery was witnessing exceptional growth and unprecedented investment, but they needed to fill numerous engineering positions to support this growth.
The Company
An International business, they design, build and supply large capital machinery, working across three core Food Product Sectors. Each of the three core sectors has its own dedicated engineering development team and due to the nature of the machinery, it’s essential that all new engineering employees have specific process knowledge of one of the core sectors, combined with highly developed engineering calculation skills.
The Challenge
The company was witnessing exceptional growth and unprecedented investment, but they needed to fill numerous engineering positions to support this growth. Due to the difficulties previously faced recruiting for such positions, they tried utilising the services of a large number of recruitment companies in the hope of reaching a wider candidate audience. However, this approach failed to improve the quality of candidates, instead it resulted in the HR Team spending excessive amounts of time reviewing CV’s of unsuitable candidates and filtering through duplicated applications from multiple recruiters.
One of our Engineering Recruitment Consultants visited the customer site and met with several members of the HR and Engineering Management team to gain a detailed understanding of their recruitment needs and challenges faced. The consultant took an in-depth tour of the machinery plant and discussed key skills and culture fit issues that other recruiters had overlooked.
The Result
It was agreed that due to the previous difficulties in recruiting appropriate candidates, a closer relationship between the customer and recruiter was needed. This enabled the customer to spend more time with us, and we spoke with a number of cross-functional managers and other levels of personnel, which enabled us to build a complete picture of the business, from it’s customer base, technical challenges through to the type of personality who would fit in each department. Combining this knowledge with high levels of two-way feedback between customer and recruiter, we were able to adjust our approach until the right level and calibre of candidate were being consistently sourced.
The customer agreed to work with us on an exclusive basis going forward and we have gone on to introduce a number of candidates who have been employed in a variety of roles, such as: 3 x Divisional Head of Engineering Managers, Design Engineers, Commissioning Engineers and Engineering Buyers.
This case study is a great example of the benefits of working very closely with one ‘industry expert’ recruiter to achieve much better results than working with a large number non-specialist recruiters.
