Flexible Talent Acquisition as a Service

Our client

Our client is one of Australia’s largest food and support service companies. Their 13,000 team members nourish the bodies, minds, and souls of thousands of people every day through food and support services focused on health and wellbeing.

With 700 locations Australia-wide, Our client and its operating brands are recognised throughout the communities in which they work as industry leaders. Not only in their core service offerings, but also their approach to sustainability, innovation, community engagement, and diversity and inclusion.

Objective

Harrier was engaged by our client to flexibly enhance their talent acquisition capability, through the implementation of our Talent Acquisition as a Service (TAaaS) offering. 

Challenges

Our client lacked a clearly defined workforce/talent strategy, which led to an overall rise in cost to the client, and attributed to:

Reduction in process efficiency

• Workforce plan: Lack of a clearly defined or operationalised workforce plan to underpin the desired workforce mix
• Workforce visibility: Lack of workforce visibility led to inconsistent, inefficient rostering practices and reduced internal mobility
• Technology: Incumbent technology ecosystem not fit for purpose
• Data: Limited ability to extract whole of workforce data for strategic or operational decision making
• Resourcing: Limited talent acquisition resources.

Increase in costs

• Labour spend: Increasing labour spend due to heavy reliance on a casual, labour hire workforce and little to no use of permanent part time employees.

High risk and increase in attrition rates across the workforce

• Attrition: High attrition across the full workforce, with casual attrition of particular concern
• Governance: Lack of governance and rigour around the use of labour hire workers and supply through labour hire suppliers
• Growth plans: Risk of attraction and retention of the workforce not enabling the organisational growth plans
• COVID-19 pandemic: COVID-19 exacerbated talent attraction and retention issues.

Decline in the overall quality of hires

• Candidate supply: Candidate supply increasingly challenging for both permanent and labour hire workers.

Solution

Harrier modelled a service delivery team which was aligned to key talent segments and locations. This model was modular in nature, allowing us to work together with our client to adjust resourcing levels up and down, or shift portfolio responsibilities amongst the team as required.

Our solution addressed our client’s key challenges of process efficiency, costs, risk and quality of hire.

Analysis of Hiring Data 

• Harrier conducted an analysis of the past 12 months’ hiring data for casual, permanent, and casual relief hires across our clients operating brands to design the highest impact team, delivering on hard-to-fill roles and geographies providing relief to the internal team

Team Structure, Alignment, Discovery and Project Planning

• Embedded a team consisting of two Senior Talent Acquisition Specialists and four Talent Acquisition Specialists initially, which flexibly grew in peak periods
• Aligned the team by location to cover hires for Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland.
• Undertook discovery and project planning as part of the solution implementation.
• Collaborated with our client to define portfolio alignment and roles and responsibilities.
• Ensured the team's understanding of the current process and compliance steps during the planning phase.

Our Client Director has an effective partnership and operating rhythm with our client’s senior management. The Client Director’s scope includes:

• directing and managing work collaboratively, ensuring a seamless flow of information
• facilitating the sharing and transfer of knowledge between teams
• leveraging insights to collaboratively identify ways to support the internal team in delivering outstanding outcomes.

End-to-end Talent Acquisition Support

This team is supporting our client’s talent acquisition function across the end-to-end process by:

• creating advertisements for roles, proactive candidate searches, conducting applicant and desk reviews and phone screens for preferred candidates
• developing interview guides, conducting phone and video interviewing, collation of preferred candidates
• managing verbal offer management, and candidate rejection notifications.
• creating and managing talent pools for permanent casual and casual-pool candidates, using our clients PageUp system

 On-demand Support from Centre of Excellence

Our core team is also provided with on-demand support by Harrier’s highly experienced Community of Experts (CoE) – offering advice such as sourcing tactics and market dynamics, to ensure a smooth workflow from receipt of a live job or demand signal through to an offer being made.

Iterative Review and Continuous Improvement

Throughout the project, Harrier has undertaken an iterative review process including short term improvement opportunities such as team operating structure, internal client engagement strategies, team processes and systems. Robust governance and quality assurance is achieved through a monthly governance and reporting cycle with the Executive Sponsors, as well as strong stakeholder communication and engagement.  

Outcomes

Increase in process efficiency

• Through our talent acquisition expertise, Harrier is helping our client align to their total workforce strategy and organisational growth plans

• A scalable talent acquisition team that can evolve in line with our client’s future requirements
• Consistent review of process and complementary technologies which could be considered as part of the future state technology ecosystem

 Reduction in costs and labour spend

•  Successfully delivering approximately 3,000 roles each year

• Expertise to promote evolution of talent acquisition
• Expert support to manage the full talent acquisition process, from sourcing candidates to onboarding
• Enhanced employer brand.

Lowered risk and attrition rates across workforce

•  Rigorous compliance management, reducing risk
• Improved candidate experience

 Increase in overall quality of hires

•  Improved candidate supply including direct sourced, referred, and labour hire sourced candidates.

“Harrier’s support has been incredible. It has allowed us to place focused effort on talent attraction campaigns that enable scalability, ensuring we can hire against critical projects quickly. As a result, we have been able to significantly improve our talent pools and slash labour hire costs.” - Head of Talent, Client

Looking for a fast, scalable, flexible Talent Acquisition solution? Contact our team today for an obligation free consultation and benefit from our cost-effective pricing with no lock-in contracts.