1. Discovery Call

Our client are a London based online education and learning business employing over 125 people. They got in touch with us after paying a significant 5 figure fee for a candidate who lasted less than 6 weeks with no rebate or replacement from the agency.

The initial discovery call established that our client were using recruitment agencies as their first port of call for all vacancies and paying varying fee rates with little by way of guarantees.

After a more in-depth analysis of their full recruitment process, we identified the fact that hiring managers were using agencies as the default option regardless of the type of vacancy because it made their job easier – so there was no thought of the cost per hire.

In addition, there was no attention paid to cultural fit within individual teams or the organization as a whole, resulting in many appointed candidates leaving after a very short period and having to start the whole recruitment process again.

2. Bespoke Solution

Our solution was multi-pronged and included a complete overhaul of our client’s recruitment process.

One of the first steps we introduced was psychometric profiling of their current staff to identify the personality types that would fit best for each category of hire within each specific team. We undertake psychometric profiling of all candidates as a standard part of our recruitment process so we could match any potential candidates against the likely fit within the team. This significantly increases the chances of a candidate being successful and remaining with the business long term.

We also identified around 70% of their roles could be filled using branded online job advertising with support from our in-house team to shortlist candidates and ensure cultural fit even before interview stage. This was a much more cost effective approach than paying significantly higher agency fees for much lower quality candidates.

For the remaining 30% of roles, we identified these as business critical strategic hires, which required a much more targeted headhunting approach to find the best performing candidates for our client. Again, this delivered much better quality candidates first time, ensuring the client received value for money for every penny of their recruitment spend.

3. Outcome

Having previously reverted to recruitment agencies as the automatic way to recruit any vacancy within the business, our successful intervention ensured our client approached recruitment in the most cost effective way for each role.

Their overall cost per hire dropped by 43% along with a reduction in time-to-hire of 3 weeks.

Furthermore, 6 months in to the relationship, all the candidates appointed are still in place removing the unnecessary cost and wasted time of having to re-recruit for the same roles.