The global corporate information provider, Williams Lea, has contracted the recruitment of technical and managerial personnel across the whole of continental Europe to the fast growing recruitment outsourcing specialist, Ochre House.
Under the agreement, Ochre House will provide support to operations in 18 countries across the continent.
Williams Lea has expanded rapidly across Europe from a base in the UK and historically has handled professional and technical recruitment through an in-house team.
However the company now wants to move to a ‘best practice’ model which will free up resources and be flexible enough to be scaled upwards or downwards depending on the rapidly changing needs of the business.
“They set potential providers a major challenge,” says Ochre House’s international director, Javier Carrasco, “because initially they will need a very high level of recruitment expertise but will only be looking at a relatively small number of hires. They also need to be able to map very specialist target individuals across a wide range of employment markets to identify and attract the ‘best in field’ as and when a specific need arises.”
“We secured the contract by devising a solution which gives a combination of high quality and flexibility,” says Carrasco.
“We have now put in place an embedded talent manager who works with line managers across the continent backed up by an off-site team of multi-lingual consultants. The talent manager acts as a knowledge conduit and ensures that we’re hiring at the same high level of quality throughout all of Williams Lea’s operations.
“In a very short time we’ve already managed to reduce reliance on local agencies dramatically to the extent that all recruitment to date has been direct, with an immediate effect on hiring costs. And at the same time we’ve begun to have a demonstrable impact on employee attrition levels.”
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“While purely domestic talent management is obviously still key, the internationalisation of labour markets, particularly at professional and managerial level means that a regional approach is becoming increasingly important,” says Ochre House’s CEO, Chris Herrmannsen.
“The individual that can make or break a specific project or a strategic plan may no longer be found on the doorstep, but at the other end of a continent and it’s the job of talent management specialists like ourselves to find, attract and retain them for our clients.”
