Two organizations relied on RPO to help overcome immediate hiring challenges.
By Debbie Bolla
“Organizations have more complexity and less predictability,” says Gidon Ohana, vice president, global RPO solution design for KellyOCG + Sevenstep. “They need more hands-on help and want their provider to be more flexible and agile, solving talent problems rather than just making hires.”
As Ohana points out, the current state of the talent market is challenging for many talent acquisition (TA) leaders around the world. With constant changes, organizations struggle to keep pace and often lack the knowledge and expertise to pivot quickly. In fact, 48% of employers struggle to secure global talent and 69% of organizations in the US were challenged to fill permanent roles over the last year.
Now is the perfect time to rethink strategy, he notes. The key to success is working with a trusted partner that has greater capability and reach to overcome hiring challenges. “Organizations get the advantage of the wider knowledge and experience an RPO has in solving challenges for multiple organizations. This is much better rather than having to build all the expertise into an internal team,” he explains.
With this in mind, Ohana shares two recent experiences when organizations incorporated new talent strategies and gained efficiencies through a partnership with KellyOCG + Sevenstep.
Problem: New drug launch hinges on niche hiring across multiple countries in a compressed timeframe
With the task of producing treatments for rare conditions, a global biopharmaceutical organization was often in a fast-paced growth mode that wasn’t sustainable for internal TA teams alone. They partnered with KellyOCG + Sevenstep for hiring in their UK headquarters and manufacturing sites across EMEA.
As a new drug was about to launch—requiring 40 to 50 specialized hires—the TA team knew additional expertise was required. Specifically, the project called for roles across eight countries, meaning varying language skills were needed, as well as a strong cultural fit. To tackle these circumstances, the answer was project RPO.
“It wasn’t a traditional RPO at all. We brought this group together, and it was a project team,” says Ohana. Highly specialized roles call for highly specialized recruiters—ones that were trained to handle hires across multiple countries, with a solid understanding of company culture. The interview process was customized to ensure that qualifying candidates moved along quickly. Sourcing was also critical because of the unique skills required.
“We could approach hiring differently by ramping up when needed,” explains Ohana. “We solved the problem by looking at it differently.” In the end, the project successfully filled 45 roles, and nearly every one required a niche skill to support the overall effort, including technical expertise and business and professional competencies. The success of the rapid hiring push across languages and varying skills rested on the broad and flexible capabilities of a global RPO partner.
Problem: Global hiring, fluctuating demand and different work models strain distributed internal TA capabilities
In a second example, a global medical device manufacturer with multiple operating companies wanted to streamline processes and work with a partner for all manufacturing recruitment. One of their biggest challenges was their global footprint and fluctuating demand.
“It’s very hard to aggregate demand across languages,” says Ohana. “They have people in Scandinavia, Central and Western Europe, in the UK and Ireland. While they’re an English-speaking organization, they still needed language skills to help them hire successfully.”
Another challenge was that the need for those language skills fluctuated. They would hire a recruiter who spoke French, but then a new role would call for someone who could speak Swedish. With its reach, KellyOCG + Sevenstep assembled a team of recruiters in their central European hub that could flex and align with demand. They built a ratio of recruiters to meet the ratio of vacancies.
Improvements and efficiencies were also made to recruiting processes by leveraging data. For example, the partnership used metrics around past performance and commonly hired vacancies to help predict time-to-fill. Data revealed certain roles that would take longer to fill compared to others, which allowed the team to start proactive sourcing earlier. This approach resulted in decreased time-to-hire.
Through this analysis, three levels of vacancies were identified:
- the first tier that could easily be filled with applicants;
- the second tier that required some sourcing; and
- the third tier that called for proactive sourcing.
“The forward-looking data and related holistic strategies really created efficiency, cost savings, and a better experience,” says Ohana. “The ongoing effort reflects an advantage many clients experience through predictive planning, aligning recruiting resources to best fulfill assignments by level of difficulty. The flexibility of a recruiting hub to support teams around a region creates a cost-effective approach to deploying the right skills quickly to solve a hiring need, regardless of location.”
Together, these examples of problem solving RPO show that employers no longer limit their partners to simple hiring needs. When a need arises that requires speed, efficiency, or access to talent, the right partner can make the difference in a successful outcome, even in the most challenging business situations.
