Case Studies

Total Talent Partnership: WilsonHCG’s Consultation Helps Fortune 500 Tech Company Rebuild Brand, Integrate Workforce Planning and Transform Recruitment

CHALLENGE:

One global medical technology company, a Fortune 500 leader in the industry – headquartered in the US and operating across 100 countries worldwide – was thriving in many business areas but, in consultation with WilsonHCG, found gaps in perhaps their most vital spaces: talent acquisition, employment brand and strategic workforce planning across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Specifically, the client was seeking to enter various EMEA regions but was unsure they had the appropriate organization structure in talent acquisition to support their business growth aspirations within the EMEA medical appliances and equipment marketplace.

This led to a discussion with WilsonHCG; we provided in-depth EMEA market research and a comprehensive “deep dive” evaluation of the technology company’s personnel performance, talent acquisition structure, technologies in use, employee value proposition and employment brand. From here, WilsonHCG provided a comprehensive report followed by a strategic talent acquisition structure for the technology company to integrate. In brief, WilsonHCG’s consultation found significant need and opportunity around the following:

• Multi-channel direct sourcing and the attraction of suitable, top-quality sales and financial professionals to meet constantly changing recruitment needs; sourcing the “right” people as opposed to “more” people.
• Build an EMEA talent pipeline that would ensure proactivity for the long term.
• Freeing up time for hiring manager and Human Resources (HR) teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.
• Improving the management, stability and strategy around internal recruitment processes.
• Minimizing time-to-fill while improving talent quality and other key recruitment ratios.
• Developing and strategically broadcasting an integrated employment brand, both externally to candidates and internally through employee empowerment.

Following consultation, the Fortune 500 client began to undertake internal efforts to transform in the above areas. However, they lacked the region-specific expertise and global resources; in turn, the client partnered with WilsonHCG on a one-year, project basis to explore the provider’s capabilities. The success of this project led to an additional project and soon thereafter full, end-to-end talent partnership.

SOLUTION: 

Total Talent Consultation

As noted above, built around its mission of integrity, accountability, performance and people, and with more than 30,000 employees worldwide, the Fortune 500 medical technology company partnered with WilsonHCG first for consultation and insight into various aspects of their talent strategy within the EMEA – with partnership ultimately expanding to uniting its IT, sales, finance and regulatory talent ecosystem in a way that would help them find and keep the best niche, complex talent while simultaneously growing employment brand from the inside out through employee brand ambassadorship.

Of note, WilsonHCG expressed the need for “total talent” management; highlighting the importance of shifting from traditional talent acquisition to a fully integrated strategy that focuses on the entire employee journey – from pre-candidate pipelining and experiences to strategic employee engagement and retention efforts – as one area of talent strategy cannot succeed without all areas thriving off of one another.

Initial Project-Specific Support

Specific to the initial one-year project, WilsonHCG built its short-term project strategy around providing scalable sourcing support for the company’s sales and finance division within the EMEA. WilsonHCG provided initial consultation with the client’s recruitment business partners as well as hiring managers to gain insight into role profiles, corporate culture, employment brand mission (explored more below), as well as the core skills and experience required for defined roles.

WilsonHCG then carefully yet quickly developed and integrated a full-time, expert talent team to support the client’s EMEA business for this set project and to recruit finance candidates for permanent and fixed-term finance contract positions within the Fortune 500 leader’s “purpose-built” European Business Services Centre in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The open finance roles included accounts payable and financial analysts. Based upon the early success of this initial finance role project, the client expanded partnership to include an additional project that involved the recruiting of sales representative and regional sales manager roles across France, Germany and the UK. WilsonHCG’s project-specific support ultimately grew into full comprehensive recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) partnership.

Transforming Fortune 500 Brand into Employer of Choice

In both the initial partnership and the end-to-end partnership that followed, to build brand awareness within various EMEA markets, WilsonHCG began seeking passive candidates – communicating the client as an employer of choice and beginning the development of a referral program to enhance current talent management, including engagement and retention. However, one challenge was the salary limitations within the EMEA. While continuing to build the candidate pipeline, WilsonHCG provided market research; sharing with leadership the under-market salaries currently being offered by the company and how it was impacting their ability to bring in the best talent.

By educating the internal team on competitive salary ranges, the client achieved significant growth in the candidate screening stage; of note, reducing the number of candidates progressing through the hiring process based on their salary expectations and improving efficiency as vital time was now only being spent on engaged and interested candidates.  

Although a well known consumer brand within the US medical technology industry, in partnership with WilsonHCG the Fortune 500 client found there to be opportunity to increase the relevancy of its global employment brand. The WilsonHCG team conducted a deep dive into the client’s talent branding strategy, gathering information through employee interviews as well as reviews of various documentation to gain an understanding of the client’s highly successful US branding efforts and how these might translate to the EMEA.

Specifically, WilsonHCG performed a number of key stakeholder interviews – including hiring managers, as well as talent acquisition and HR leaders. The team also evaluated past employment brand communications and hiring manager feedback, likewise focusing on why the client is considered an employer of choice in various markets and how efforts could best be instilled across the EMEA. The team broke down these efforts into two unique components:

• Define what’s special about having a job with the company (asking employees to answer with four key aspects). The goal was to create a consistent and empowering candidate journey, while likewise giving current employees a voice and platform to share their stories.
• In employees’ own words, defining the organization’s mission, vision and values, and sharing how they feel the company is different from the competition (i.e., telling employee’s personal stories in a way that highlights what makes the client unique) in order to spark interest from both active and passive candidates while developing targeted personas.

Uniting the Talent Ecosystem through Innovative Best Practices

WilsonHCG also leveraged its comprehensive Fortune 500 Top 100 Employment Brands Report and the methodology used to build this report to gain insight into the client’s brand and culture, then benchmarked against industry competitors while supplementing the research with WilsonHCG’s internal data warehouse analysis. The WilsonHCG team’s consultation and research included leveraging the following sources: corporate careers pages, social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Google+, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, among other platforms), the aforementioned WilsonHCG employment branding report, internal communications and surveys among client employees, as well as region-specific, industry and historical company metrics/benchmarks.

A unique component of WilsonHCG’s employment branding consultation included advocating for a comprehensive “toolkit” for employees to learn from, complete with internal and external brand messaging, company background and history, as well as marketing collateral. WilsonHCG then supported the Fortune 500 client in updating marketing collateral and region-specific job descriptions across all channels while implement the use of social tools to enhance employment branding communications. In addition, WilsonHCG recommended and helped implement customer relationship management (CRM) technology to better target employment branding communication and create seamless, functional segmentation strategy.

Specific to workforce planning, since implementation of the WilsonHCG team, there have been constant changes to the requisition numbers sought by the Fortune 500 client. Based on WilsonHCG’s market mapping, industry research and strategic workforce planning efforts, the Fortune 500 leader continues to increase/decrease open requisitions based on need, and enter new markets, with full confidence in WilsonHCG’s ability to scale at moment’s notice.

Results:

WilsonHCG has built the Fortune 500 leader’s candidate funnel within the EMEA to nearly 3,000 qualified professionals. All hiring needs were met during the initial projects, with 85 percent of offers extended being to passive candidates and, of note, WilsonHCG helped reduce agency usage to zero (including dollars spent).

WilsonHCG achieved an offer to accept to hire length of 21.9 days, far better than industry averages, while vastly improving candidate experience and thereby employment brand as a whole. Specific to WilsonHCG’s market mapping efforts, the dedicated team engaged 871 total candidates within the EMEA market, receiving important, transparent brand feedback that has since been used to continue strategically building the company’s consumer and employment brands.

WilsonHCG’s employment branding support helped the Fortune 500 leader’s brand ranking leap from 176th of 500 total to inside the top 15 overall over the course of one year according to WilsonHCG’s employment brand industry best practice research methodology. The client experienced dramatic employment brand growth in six key areas:

• Strategy around and usage of the company careers page
• Job boards
• Employee engagement reviews/assessment and candidate engagement assessments
• Providing accolades among the current workforce to enhance engagement and retention
• Recruitment marketing
• Corporate social responsibility.

As noted previously, the global Fortune 500 medical technology company initially engaged WilsonHCG for one-year, project-specific support. WilsonHCG’s ability to find and attract top-quality talent, followed by the global talent solutions provider’s consultation efforts around employment brand and workforce planning/entering new, challenging markets has led to an end-to-end RPO partnership that continues to evolve and grow today.