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Tag: Candidate Identification

Energy Service Provider Rapidly Expands Technical Services Team

Client Challenge

DoubleStar was engaged by a company in an emerging industry to lead recruiting. Because most of the hiring managers worked in the field and there was no talent acquisition team in place, they needed a partner who could provide soup-to-nuts recruiting services. Our team was tasked with research, qualifying, engagement, and screening initiatives. This partnership accelerated the company’s growth and ability to support their customers. 

Our Solution

DoubleStar approached this as both a recruiting and educational partnership. Each client is unique, and it is vital for clients to educate our team on their specific needs. In exchange, we educate them on the market, best practices, and how we will achieve their goals. 

The DoubleStar team began recruiting for multiple positions which included a mix of management level and individual contributors. We staffed the project with consultants that held expertise in research, recruiting, and project management. There were many factors that proved to be challenging from the start:

  • Potential candidates worked in the field. Finding, engaging, and qualifying them took more time.
  • Mutual availability between the candidates and hiring managers to conduct interviews was sparse.
  • Speed and efficiency were critical – as the client began new projects, they needed workers on sites or risked losing contracts.
  • Candidates were required to have specialized skill sets and certifications. We quickly found out there is no national standard for these certifications – requirements vary state to state.

Our experts were successfully able to navigate these hurdles and deliver results by developing an extensive candidate funnel. With the success of the initial engagement, we became a trusted partner and expanded the project to fulfill continued growth. We are proud of this relationship and that we were viewed as essential to the success of their organization. 

Business Impacts

DoubleStar’s unique service-based pricing structure historically delivers clients 40%-60% savings versus firms with traditional transaction-based pricing methods. With the current state of the economy, we understand how vital it is to efficiently maximize your budget. Whether it is a high-volume project like this recent example or a group of specialty positions you need filled, we can deliver the right candidates at an affordable cost. 

Specialized Life Sciences Company Benefits From DoubleStar Sourcing Strategy

Talent acquisition is critical for every organization but for an early growth company, it can make or break them. To achieve business goals and continue development of their team, this life sciences company could not settle for anything less than top candidates. While it is an arduous task to hire just one position in today’s environment, hiring for multiple positions requires an expert business partner like DoubleStar.

Client Challenge

DoubleStar was contacted in early 2022 by a life sciences company developing a cutting edge, first-to-market therapy. The company did not have a formal talent acquisition function and given its small staff, most were working in labs daily. This left little time to find and assess potential hires. They needed a partner to research, source, engage, and screen prospective candidates with the end goal of delivering a qualified and interested pool of individuals to the hiring managers. Given that this company’s product is like no other currently in market, it required very specific science-based talent. Although our recruiters have extensive life sciences experience, the advanced nature of the client’s needs required them to quickly educate themselves on very technical profiles to be able to identify the right candidates.

Our Solution

Throughout the discovery process, we learned that the client had previously utilized recruitment firms that were unable to consistently meet their hiring needs. Our team of experts identified the hardships this client had faced and educated them about how DoubleStar’s approach would deliver on their needs, and how, together, their goals could be achieved. DoubleStar staffed the project with a team of researchers, recruiters, and a project leader. This team immediately faced headwinds as they began the candidate search. The positions:

  • Required very niche scientific backgrounds.
  • Entailed working on site (on the heels of the pandemic).
  • Had little exposure. Positions had previously been posted only on the company’s website where there was low awareness of the roles and the organization.
  • Had skill requirements that changed frequently to meet the demands of a young company where business needs were evolving.

To overcome these challenges, the team focused on a heavy research campaign to penetrate the limited talent pool. We knew it would take time to identify and engage the right candidates, so as we do with every project, we emphasized transparent communication with our client and provided education on delivering a quality candidate experience. As the client began to see results from our efforts, we were able to gain their trust in our methods; and they felt confident we would deliver the right talent. Through this approach, the initial positions were filled and DoubleStar was tasked with hiring for more roles.

Business Impacts

Over the course of the project, the team had many successful hires. This has been viewed as a tremendous accomplishment by both DoubleStar and the client, especially given the very specific nature of these positions. Our team’s commitment to delivering only the highest quality of candidates led to them sourcing thousands of individuals for these roles. In addition to providing the client with valuable knowledge, which they can use for future recruitment efforts, our service-based pricing method yielded significant cost savings. Our service-based cost structure continually delivers 40%-60% savings compared to firms with traditional transaction-based pricing methods. In this specific example, we were able to deliver savings of 50%.

Fortune 100 Insurance Company Targets Specific Talent Pools

Client Challenge

The Recruiting Team at a property and casualty insurance company wanted to identify specific, hard-to-recruit talent throughout the insurance industry to target for direct-recruiting initiatives. The internal team could execute the direct-recruiting activities, but they lacked the time and the research expertise to identify the specific targets at key competitors.

Our Solution

DoubleStar designed and executed a Talent Market Intelligence and Recruitment campaign, targeting actuarial and product development talent across 10 organizations that comprised the client’s most direct competitors. More than simply gathering names and email addresses, DoubleStar’s team developed detailed Talent Maps containing organizational hierarchies, titles, career paths/promotion ladders, and compensation data and practices, giving the client deep insight into how competitors organized, operated, and deployed talent in these highly competitive occupations.

Business Impacts

Prior to this project, the client possessed no competitive recruiting data. After working with our team, they now own a comprehensive Talent Map that will be used not only for recruiting purposes but also to provide market intelligence to inform their own Talent Management Practices.

This recruiting asset helped the client better target its recruiting efforts, save money and time by shortening the candidate-generation cycle, and serve as a ready-made candidate pool for future recruiting efforts.

Global Pharma Developer Increases Interview Slate Diversity

Client Challenge

The US Division of a Global Pharmaceutical company sought to increase the representation of diverse candidates on interview slates to a minimum of 25% per slate for targeted roles. With precious few diverse candidates in the target populations, meeting this challenge would require a focused, deliberate approach.

Our Solution

In partnership with our client’s Talent Acquisition Team, DoubleStar led the development of a diversity recruiting initiative that used a combination of deep web-based research, focused sourcing, direct outreach, and disciplined screening to identify and qualify robust pools of diverse talent.

Our solution included:

  • Identification of specific targeted roles
  • Customized research and direct-sourcing initiatives for each role, including a different approach to provide candidates for current openings vs. building talent pipelines for likely future roles
  • Proactive, multichannel outreach initiatives, including cold-calling
  • Conducting detailed phone interviews to determine fit and qualifications

Business Impacts

This project was measured against very specific outcomes. The most important result is that 85% of the positions assigned to this effort now have at least a 25% diversity representation on interview slates.

Also, 200-400 qualified diversity candidates are added to our client’s talent database each month for use in future recruiting initiatives. Additionally, 250 new diverse candidates are added against current openings each month, of which 50% are moved into the hiring manager’s inbox. This means that 125 new diverse candidates are being identified each month that would not have been found using the client’s standard sourcing methods.

Fortune 100 Retailer Expands Corporate & Store Management Talent Pools

Client Challenge

The U.S. Division of a Global Retailer was falling short of its aggressive recruiting goals in critical retail-specific leadership and flagship store management roles.

Further, owing to low turnover, Division leadership felt that the group had lost touch with the external talent market in their industry and sought to develop benchmarks for talent practices among their key talent competitors.

Our Solution

DoubleStar’s Research Team partnered with our client’s HR leaders to identify target talent pools in key competitors, build targeted recruiting databases, conduct research to determine talent practices (including compensation models, promotional paths, career development opportunities, and benefits program details), and develop talent maps of competitors’ organization structures and hierarchies.

To gather this data, our team used web-based sources to identify potential candidates, executed outreach and engagement initiatives, conducted one-on-one interviews, and integrated talent information from a variety of external sources to develop the following deliverables:

  • A talent map of this client’s top 5 competitors, including org structures and complete lists of employee names and titles
  • Job descriptions and compensation structures and practices for all targeted roles
  • Talent management information for all roles and career paths
  • A recruiting database of prequalified prospective talent for use in current and future direct-recruiting initiatives

Business Impacts

Our client utilized the talent management information to adjust their employment proposition to become a more attractive destination for top talent looking to accelerate their careers. They also adjusted internal talent management practices to increase their market competitiveness, resulting in increased employee satisfaction and engagement and a decrease in annual attrition rates in key roles.

The recruiting database was used as the centerpiece of a recruiting initiative that targeted filling 30 key roles in the following 4 months. Sixty-five percent of those hires were sourced through the database, saving an estimated $450,000 in agency fees and other recruiting costs.

Acute Care Hospital Creates Targeted Direct Recruiting Initiatives

Client Challenge

An acute care hospital was having difficulty filling RN roles, and with more requisitions opening each week, they were falling further behind. They knew they needed to change their approach to their market but didn’t quite know how to attack the problem.

Our Solution

DoubleStar partnered with the client’s TA leader to analyze the problem and generate new solutions. The hospital employed about 1,800 RNs but had very little market intelligence about the remaining 4,500 RNs who lived in their county. As a first step, DoubleStar’s Talent Intelligence team developed a database of all RNs in the hospital’s county and close-in areas outside of the county. This database enabled us to create a ZIP code–specific view of the local RN population to determine RN market size by ZIP code. We then combined that data with hospital data on their current and former RN workforce.

With this data, we could determine the hospital’s market share of RNs in each ZIP code, and more importantly, how many RNs were available to be hired in each ZIP code. The hospital was able to use this information to build targeted recruiting campaigns, such as open houses, meets and greets, and outdoor advertising in new ways, knowing that their investments were highly targeted and more likely to be reaching their intended audience.

Business Impacts

Armed with a targeted list of RNs and a ZIP code–based market-share analysis of the regional RN talent market, this hospital was able to increase RN attendance at its recruiting events by 40+%, decrease its time-to-fill for RN openings by 3 weeks, and develop a pipeline of pre-qualified RN candidates for future recruiting needs.