Creating Business Growth Through Recruitment Strategy

Our client, who is recognised as a market leader within Independent Quality Engineering and Software Testing services, is dedicated to their continued expansion internationally. They targeted the UK market as a region to increase their operations, however, recognised that they needed to adjust their internal operations as their current format was not conducive to international growth. While this can be seen as a daunting task, they had the support of Cogito, who provided extensive research to help the business in understanding the needs of their talent pool, ensuring that when it was time for them to recruit top-quality test professionals, they had a proposition that was enticing to potential candidates.

This business already has established operations in foreign countries, most notably their office in the UK, which was opened in 2014 and again expanded in 2018, demonstrating a significant step in our client’s ascension as well as their clear vision to expand their world-class software testing services. Nevertheless, most of their operations continue to take place in their Indian offices, to the extent that many of their employees are hired from India and then would be relocated to the UK if necessary. Our client recognised this practice was both costly and unsustainable. This encouraged the business to take the next step in their international growth strategy, in the form of re-modelling their recruitment processes. Our client sought to continue their business growth via the UK through the hiring of test engineering professionals of various levels within the organisation. Our client identified four roles in which they would be looking to recruit, these were Test Engineers, Test Analysts, Test Managers and Test Programme Managers.

Before proceeding with any recruitment, it was important for our client to understand the level of quality within the UK talent pool – this would go a long way in helping the business assess whether hiring UK-based professionals would support the business’s goals of expanding their software testing operations. Our client wanted to look at the big picture in terms of the level of talent of test professionals within 50 miles of London. Of course, this represents a high-volume approach to identify an extensive amount of talent within the desired area. This level of the search was simply outside of the capability of our clients’ current recruitment partner to complete individually and therefore engaged with us to support them through our talent mapping services.

Alongside our client, we identified the key skills that are required within these Test roles to ensure they would be an asset to the business and made this an essential part of our search criteria. Once this was agreed, we collectively identified the 14 fundamental skills suitable for this position and therefore we split our searches into the 14 skills.

Extensive talent process to identify a large talent pool

Once we had identified the 14 skills of which we were looking for within the talent pool, we were able to proceed with engaging potentially suitable candidates. Our research began with extensive candidate searching via LinkedIn, this involved 14 separate searches where we were able to capture a pool of candidates who appeared to match the prerequisite skills required to be considered for a test opportunity with the business.

Between the 14 searches, we identified over 7000 candidates. After further consideration, 2191 were recognised to be closely aligned to the business needs and therefore suitable for further contact. Each of these candidates were approached, and we were able to have engagement with 477 of these, during these conversations, we were able to disclose the business of whom we were contacting them about, as well as discuss their skill set and professional experience and finally understand their propensity to look for a new role and what it would take for them to consider moving from their current position.

Sophisticated Insights offering unprecedented levels of meaningful data

After the conclusion of this research, we were able to present our client with a range of data trends. Through our sophisticated data insights provider, we were able to identify the following statistics:

Talent Pool

• Percentage of the talent pool who were interested in pursuing a role with our client.
• Percentage of the talent pool who declined the opportunity to continue discussing a new role with the business. This data extended to identifying the reasons why these candidates declined this opportunity.

Demographics

• Gender Split between the total talent pool.
• Top 5 sectors within the talent pool.
• Top 5 employers within the talent pool.

Experience

• Frequency of skills identified within the talent pool.
• Frequency of skills identified by gender.
• Seniority level within the talent pool.
• Team size of the organisations the talent pool work within.
• Years of test engineering experience within Financial Services.
• Years of test management experience within the Financial Services sector.

Reward and Benefits

• Average Current Salary within the talent pool, with insight into how this talent pool is paid.
• The presence of bonuses alongside the salary offered, and specifics within this.
• Salary Distribution within the talent pool.

Employer Branding

• Awareness of our client within the talent pool.
• Awareness of our client’s vacancies within the talent pool.
• Perception of our client as an employer, with insight into how these perceptions were formed.

Candidate Motivators

• Insight into why the candidate decided to leave their previous role.
• Understanding what a candidate would be looking for if they were to start a new role.

Through identifying these insights, it allowed our client to understand the desires and needs of the candidates within the talent pool before directly approaching them. Through doing things in this order, it afforded our client the benefit of having extensive knowledge of the talent pool before formally advertising their roles. Arguably most importantly, this ensures that when it is time to advertise their roles, that they will have the information which will make our client confident that they will have an interesting proposition when advertising their roles.

Developing roadmap strategy for future recruitment

Of the candidates we contacted, 233 indicated that they would be interested in pursuing a role with our client, either immediately or in the future. We decided to regret 23 candidates, as they did not match the level of skills and experience compared to the rest of the talent pool. We also identified the top 10 candidates who indicated that they would be interested in being immediately considered for a role with the business. We included them in the final report to enable our client to recognise the standard of the strongest personnel within the market, which can go some way in helping the business develop a benchmark.

This project provided our client with critical information which will empower them to proceed with an extensive recruitment project with the confidence that they will have a proposition that is enticing to potential candidates within the talent pool. Without this research project, our client would be going into this recruitment process with limited knowledge of what the talent pool would be looking for from an employer, meaning their proposition may be one that is detached from the expectations of their talent pool, which could result in excessive time, additional costs or even a reduced reputation for the business.