Activating a Talent Sourcing Team to Fill Niche Engineering Roles in Europe

Background

Our client is one of the world’s most recognised brands, with a global engineering footprint that spans a range of sectors. With the increasing demand for skilled engineers, the company faced challenges in attracting and retaining top talent. The shortage of qualified candidates, combined with high competition from other firms, made it difficult to maintain a steady flow of skilled professionals. Working in close partnership with them, Armstrong Craven implemented an embedded Talent Sourcing team working directly alongside both their Talent Acquisition and Hiring Managers to ensure that all available channels to secure talent were open to them.

Objectives

• Enhance Talent Attraction: Increase the visibility and attractiveness of our client to potential candidates across Europe.
• Improve Candidate Engagement: Build and maintain relationships with potential candidates, even before they are ready to apply.
• Streamline the Recruitment Process: Develop an efficient system to identify, assess, and onboard candidates swiftly.
• Promote Diversity and Inclusion: Ensure the talent pipeline reflects a diverse and inclusive workforce.

Our Approach

1. Market Analysis and Workforce Planning

Armstrong Craven started by analysing the European engineering job market to understand the supply and demand dynamics for engineering roles. They identified key trends, including the most in-demand skills, emerging technologies, and regional talent availability. This analysis helped our client to:

• Forecast future hiring needs based on business growth projections and market trends.
• Identify strategic locations for talent pools, focusing on countries and cities with strong educational institutions and a high density of engineering professionals.

2. Talent Sourcing Strategy

Armstrong Craven set up a project team of 3-4 talented sourcing professionals, building in extra language capabilities when needed. At Armstrong Craven, our experts collectively speak over 25 different languages. We also assigned a Project Lead to ensure pace and quality of output, adherence to pre-agreed project KPIs, and to manage any fluctuations in demand with the provision of additional resource.

Our team began by mapping and approaching talent at pace in our target locations and disciplines, using several different sourcing tools and were able to start engaging with the talent cohort and submitting candidates within two weeks of commission.

3. Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives

Alongside the hiring objective of this project, our client recognized the importance of a diverse workforce. Armstrong Craven built in the following to ensure optimized diversity and inclusion.:

• Diverse Sourcing Strategies focussed on underrepresented groups in engineering.
• Revising and writing inclusive Job Descriptions, reviewing and revising job postings to use inclusive language that appeals to a broader range of candidates.

Key Results

Within 6 months of implementing the talent pipeline strategy, our project team achieved significant results:

• Increased Candidate flow: A 50% increase in qualified applicants for engineering roles.
• Time-to-Hire: The average time-to-hire decreased by 20%, allowing the company to fill roles more quickly.
• Higher Offer Acceptance Rates: Improved employer branding and engagement efforts led to a 15% increase in offer acceptance rates.
• Enhanced Workforce Diversity: Due to our ability to focus on diversity through direct sourcing, there was a noticeable increase in the diversity of candidates and new hires, contributing to a more inclusive work environment.

Conclusion

By focusing on market analysis, candidate engagement, streamlined processes, and diversity initiatives, the company successfully built a sustainable pipeline of qualified candidates, ensuring a steady supply of engineering talent for the needs of today and the needs of the future.

The embedded nature of our team meant that we acted as a extension of the TA team, providing a flexible and scalable solution that remained in place until the project objectives were successfully met.

A comprehensive talent pipelining strategy can address the challenges of hiring talent in a competitive market. Contact our team today to find out how our talent services can support your business.