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Tag: Project Recruitment

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%.

Global Consumer Products Company Workshop

Client Challenge

A $60-billion consumer products company consolidated its recruiting function, creating a centralized, global shared service. The consolidation resulted in a significant change in the way recruiting was delivered to the organization’s 250 operating companies. Initial feedback from the businesses indicated that recruiters had become too administrative and process-oriented. Hiring Managers wanted business problem-solvers who could understand their issues and deliver the recruiting results they needed.

The recruiting leadership team recognized the need to refocus the recruiters on bringing value-added services to their internal customers. The leadership team identified the need for recruiters to:

  • Build better relationships with their internal clients.
  • Lead the development of fast, responsive recruiting solutions.
  • Manage recruiting initiatives to successful conclusion.
  • Coach inexperienced managers.

While the management team understood that a comprehensive training program could begin to address these goals, they were uncertain where to start and had no time to develop the toolsets required.

Our Solution

DoubleStar designed and delivered a customized Recruitment Consulting Skills Workshop for the client’s nationwide recruiting team. The one-day workshop was custom designed for this client’s unique needs.

First, we gathered individual competency input from each recruiting team leader. We then drafted a content outline and sample training scenarios for client team walk-throughs. Using that feedback, we built a one-day training event covering five key skills using interactive lecture, trainer simulations, participant role plays, and group problem-solving techniques. The course incorporated client-specific practices and customized interactive content, designed to provide participants the opportunity to practice the new techniques in real-life scenarios that they would face.

Business Impacts

DoubleStar successfully delivered over 80 hours of hands-on training in 15 sessions to 250 recruiters from the client’s national recruiting team. Specific outcomes of the workshops included:

  • Identified 2 specific actionable behaviors per participant to be changed within 90 days of the workshop and subsequently reviewed with their manager.
  • Reviewed key elements of forming strong, trusting consultative relationships by building credibility, demonstrating reliability, and acting selflessly.
  • Learned a structured approach to minimize the impact of scope changes by applying best-practice project management techniques to plan, execute, and manage recruiting initiatives.
  • Identified mechanisms for improving hiring manager engagement practices by reviewing models for delivering tough feedback, questioning and listening, influencing, and pushing back.
  • Applied concepts and techniques through one-on-one role plays, table discussions, and simulations designed to build a partnership mentality with internal customers.
  • Provided a forum for sharing tools and techniques for handling common recruitment issues by reviewing the client’s specific case studies in the areas of discrimination, hiring manager interviewing techniques, and candidate feedback and selection.
  • Saved the client time, effort, and money compared to a traditional training model due to DoubleStar’s ability to design and deliver the workshops with consultants that possessed hands-on recruiting and industry experience.

Global Pharma Leader Reinvents Recruiting Strategy

Client Challenge

Following the acquisition of a large competitor, a global pharmaceutical research and drug development company needed to reorganize its HR function from a shared services model to a decentralized HR function, including decentralizing recruiting.

The most difficult area to transition was R&D Talent Acquisition, where older processes were non-responsive to current business needs, and no direct-sourcing expertise existed.

Adding to the transitional difficulty was a long period of uncertain hiring demand. As the companies melded their workforces, hiring demand became unclear and unpredictable. DoubleStar was engaged to help the firm reinvent its recruiting strategy, processes, and methods to become more agile, more targeted, and more efficient.

Our Solution

DoubleStar assigned a team of 5-8 recruiters (depending upon demand levels) with R&D recruiting experience to handle the day-to-day global recruiting needs of the division. We installed a direct sourcing team to provide talent-market mapping and targeted cold-sourcing capabilities. We also installed a Consulting Project Leader in the US and a Recruiting Manager in the UK to help reengineer processes, build capabilities, and train the client’s staff.

We also advised the VP of R&D Recruitment on talent planning, recruitment best practices, and measuring results against industry benchmarks. We also provided ongoing process improvement, recruitment strategy, talent optimization and consulting services, as needed.

Business Impacts

This 6-month relationship grew into a 5-year partnership that enabled the client to save over $2 million in recruiting costs, make over 1,700 global hires a year, and provide an enhanced level of recruiting and talent market services to the business leaders.

Healthcare System Fills EMR Analyst Roles in Record Time

Client Challenge

A leading healthcare system needed to cut implementation time in half for a new electronic medical records (EMR) system. The system needed to be installed in 400 physician practices in 18 months, an effort that required the identification, recruiting, and hiring of 40 highly specialized systems analysts and implementation specialists in less than 90 days.

Our Solution

DoubleStar assigned a team of recruitment consultants specializing in healthcare IT to identify candidates with the specific combination of IT and EMR knowledge required for these roles.

Working with the health system’s CIO and his direct reports, we designed and managed a recruiting initiative that identified talent targets, conducted an aggressive direct-recruiting campaign, executed detailed pre-qualification interviews, scheduled on-site interviews, and assisted our client in making and closing all offers.

Recruitment was only part of the assignment, however. DoubleStar worked with the existing IT management to construct a phased training and deployment process for the new hires to ensure optimal integration and the shortest time to productivity. The IT recruiting team later adopted this design as a best practice.

Business Impacts

The implementation of the new EMR system to 400 physician practices and ambulatory care offices took just 18 months – half the time originally projected. DoubleStar’s focused solution produced the required hires for less than $4,000 per hire, resulting in an overall savings of $250,000 compared to the cost of traditional third-party recruiting firms.

Additionally, our team transferred our entire work product to the client’s recruiting team, leaving them with a pipeline of recruitable talent for future openings and a replicable methodology for training and deploying new hires.

National IT Consulting Firm Accelerates Growth

Client Challenge

The leading national $1 billion provider of healthcare information systems launched an IT and Process Improvement Consulting Division to enable its clients to use their technology investments more effectively.

The new division’s growth was limited by only one thing: its ability to find, recruit, and hire the highly specialized healthcare IT talent required to lead the complex assignments its customers needed to execute. However, the company did not have the capability in-house to identify and recruit a large number of specialized IT professionals with skills in specific technologies for roles with an 80% national travel requirement.

To meet the need of hiring 100-125 specialized consultants annually, this client engaged DoubleStar to design and execute an end-to-end recruiting solution.

Our Solution

At the outset of this engagement, DoubleStar conducted a detailed needs analysis to determine current needs and likely near-term hiring needs. From that analysis, DoubleStar developed a national recruitment plan that prioritized both talent and geographic needs. We also created customized recruitment plans to account for the local talent market differences and a plan for efficiently screening and interviewing candidates to shorten hiring cycles.

DoubleStar then executed direct and indirect recruiting campaigns in Southern California, Chicago, Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, Boston, Philadelphia, and South Florida. The solution included centralized sourcing and direct recruiting, on-site interview teams at each location, recruitment consulting services to the client’s regional consulting directors, and strategic staffing planning services to the Division’s Vice President.

To support the direct-recruiting initiatives, DoubleStar also developed a national advertising/branding campaign, an accelerated employee referral program, and standardized interviewing templates for all positions recruited.

Business Impacts

This partnership, originally contracted for six months, was extended for over five years because it delivered continuous results, including:

  • 125 hires were executed annually, ranging from $90,000-$150,000 in compensation, at a fully loaded cost per hire under $5,000.
  • Turnover was reduced to under 10% annually due to enhanced pre-screening and more accurate selection practices.
  • The division was enabled to aggressively seek new business and prevail over the competition on the strength of its solid talent pipeline.
  • Hiring costs for this division were reduced by 50% annually, representing an annual savings of $600,000-$700,000.
  • The cost of recruitment became a fixed, predictable expense, enabling the growing division to better forecast talent acquisition investments.
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