Attracting Exceptional Talent in a New Market

Background and Scope

Armstrong Craven recently partnered with a global financial services organization on an initial 12-month embedded search and talent sourcing project. The business had ambitious growth plans in the USA, which was a relatively new market for them, being a more recognized brand in Europe and APAC. They were looking to partner with an expert talent sourcing team to help them achieve their 2022 goal of 33 new hires in one of their business-critical functions.

As well as the hiring plan, they had four more objectives;

• Build a solid pipeline of future talent across these senior roles
• Gain insight and data on talent hotspots to make long term investment decisions about where to focus business development across the country
• Understand their competitor landscape and how they are structured, attract and manage talent
• Build the internal credibility of the TA function

Due to them operating in such a competitive space, they were conscious that many prospective candidates would need to be approached rather than relying on people applying for advertised roles. Each candidate would have their own opinion of the organization and in many cases would need to buy in to our client’s vision and strategy rather than this just being a ’move to a competitor’ career decision. Therefore, they needed experienced search consultants to engage with talent and have detailed and bespoke conversations with them in order to convince them to move forward in the process.

The Solution

In partnership with our client, we built a Talent Search and Sourcing team to map and engage the market. Our team consisted of 3 expert Talent Sourcers and a project leader who would meet weekly with the client to evaluate activity and the progress of candidates.

After an initial short ramp-up time of 2 - 3 weeks, we built a map of over 3000 target individuals from which we could build location data to focus our engagement strategy. The team started reaching out and approaching prospective candidates using a variety of different methods, learning and adapting their approach methods and techniques as they went. In the majority of cases, prospects were unaware of our client’s growth in the region and needed two or three conversations before they committed to being interested in entering into the process. Whilst time-consuming, this gave the team a great opportunity to get close to candidates, understand their motivations and use this time to build up our market knowledge.

Within 3 weeks, the team were hitting their target of 9 profiles submitted every week, most weeks exceeding this and booking these candidates directly into the diaries of the TA team, cutting out any time-consuming process that could lead to candidates disengaging. We were delighted our partnership has been a momentous success, and we were instrumental in helping them hit their 2022 hiring goals three months ahead of schedule, with 79% of these 33 hires coming from our team. A further 2 hires have been made in more senior roles and in other teams.

The Results

The project has provided the client with high-quality output including:

• 6000* people mapped
• 600 engaged
• 317 submitted
• 267 interviewed
• 36 offers
• 28 offers accepted
• Average cost per hire was 14% of salary

*This includes future pipelined/future mapped talent

The business is now moving away from using traditional search partners and job adverts and are looking to grow their Armstrong Craven Sourcing Engine. As this partnership has matured, we are now seeing greater results as our teams integrate with the culture of the business, constantly overachieving on their submission-to-offer ratio. The sourcing team also has been supporting the business with understanding new talent markets and advising on how to sell the opportunities to prospective candidates of all levels.

"The partnership with Armstrong Craven has proven a real success. We’ve worked closely together, and you have become a key addition to our team. Your work has helped us not only get in front of and hire exceptional talent but provided us with valuable insights which has informed our understanding of the market and aided our hiring decisions. We look forward to continuing building out the partnership next year as we support the business with their new growth targets."

- Head of Talent Acquisition, North America

Contact our team today to learn more about Armstrong Craven’s range of services, including talent sourcing, insights, mapping and pipelining.