Rapid Scale Hiring Model Achieves Software Firm's Aggressive Goals

Background

Our client, an industry-leading enterprise software company, designs, builds and delivers leading-edge cloud and on-premises solutions. With annual revenues approaching $600 million, the organization’s workforce of almost 3,000 focuses on helping its customers grow and prosper. The firm’s staff of implementation consultants, technical analysts, leads, and project managers assist customers in all phases of implementing their systems – projects that are usually between 6 and 24 months in duration and highly complex – including modifications and customized solutions.

Challenge

The client’s services for implementing and supporting their software platforms generate the single largest share of the firm’s revenues. Unprecedented demand for these and other service offerings had created an impressive backlog of projects due to start within the next 3 to 6 months, with an even larger pipeline closely following. They needed to quickly fill scores of openings for high-in-demand implementation consultants and technical analysts but lacked the internal resources, processes, and experience to do so. Each open slot was costing them $30,000 per month in lost revenue.

Meeting these aggressive hiring goals using only the client’s internal HR resources was unrealistic for many reasons.

Their existing internal processes for candidate interviews, approvals, and onboarding couldn’t support the number of hires needed within the compressed time frame. Historically compounding challenges for their internal efforts were their stringent, inflexible hiring requirements. A well above average percent of experienced candidates never made it past a “paper review” of their qualifications. For those experienced candidates who did receive an offer, it could take as long as a month between the interviews and the offer.

Trying to hire at the required scale and speed was new to them – and for every vacant consultant position, they were losing $30,000 in billings each month. It quickly became clear that they couldn’t begin to fill the specific product group’s talent needs without help.

Solution

The first step was to identify the type and number of new hire roles. Next, the constraining hiring requirements were refined to highlight those core skills and experiences most likely to contribute to a new employee’s effectiveness. This enlarged the pool of available candidates without compromising candidate quality.

To accommodate a larger group of job candidates, more efficient and effective screening, interviewing, and approval processes were created. Motion collaboratively developed an approach that streamlined some of the client’s existing processes, expanded the interviewer pool, and helped craft standardized interviewing and hiring criteria for the interviewers.

Motion’s Rapid Scale Hiring Delivery Model immediately captured this client’s attention.

In their selected approach of this model, Motion optimizes sourcing, screening, and offer tasks to improve hit ratios, enhance efficiency, and shorten time-to-hire. Structuring of the program is flexible as the client selects the financial model that best suits their requirements, and the processes are optimized and customized to meet each client’s needs – and designed to ensure success.

In this case, the model was a success-based arrangement that included a retainer and a flat fee per hire. Results were measured by conformance to agreed-upon SLAs and a fixed number of hires over a specified time.

The revamped process created a very tight partnership between Motion's Recruiting Team, the Client’s internal recruiting team, and the business leadership, and allowed the internal recruiting team to handle a requisition volume almost double what they would ordinarily be able to on their own.

For their part, the Motion team handled all of the heavy lifting – sourcing, outreach, and first and second-level screenings.

Qualified candidates were submitted to the internal recruiting team in a seamless handoff process where the candidate was aware of the process and who they would be hearing from and when at all times.

Early on, the client and Motion established and agreed upon expectations for the program. A large candidate referral network was soon established. To more precisely target passive candidates, the Motion recruiting team combined a mix of creative search techniques with old-fashioned legwork directed toward niche groups. The team leveraged employee referrals, target companies, networking groups, and deep internet search techniques along with other resources. Motion also met weekly with the client’s Operations and Resource Planning teams to conduct workforce planning sessions to ensure alignment of both current and future needs, and with the internal recruiting teams for updates on candidates and to ensure the partnership remained tight and seamless. A feedback loop assured that the overall approach could be fine-tuned as recruiting progressed and new insights were gained.

An extensive candidate screening process was implemented for all of the technical roles, including a deep dive 30-45 minute technical phone screen covering all aspects of the job requirements in depth. This alone saved the internal TA team numerous hours of time that would have needed to be spent with these candidates.

Results

The benefits are numerous - and impressive:

• The number of submissions, interviews, and placements OUTPACED THE SCHEDULE
• COST CUT IN HALF for permanent placement
• Interview/offer timeframe reduced from 1 MONTH TO 1 DAY
• Client enjoys 60%-70% SUBMISSION-TO-INTERVIEW rate and a 50% INTERVIEW-TO-HIRE rate
• Each newly hired consultant provides an additional $30K/MONTH IN REVENUE