The Challenge

With around 10,000 employees working in the UK for Deloitte, the HR division of the business advisory and consulting organisation certainly has a job of work to do. Last year the company decided to transform its human resources by streamlining it and introducing a new services environment. The programme was called the Human Resources Transformation Project (HRTP) and implementing it raised a few problems.

“There was a growing need for a shared service centre,” said Aly Sparks, Deloitte’s director of resourcing for the UK and Switzerland, “which would take the back office elements of HR and move them to a central location, allowing the HR staff to concentrate on working more strategically.” The location for the new centre was Milton Keynes. “The initial challenge for Deloitte was that we were looking for a group of people we’d never recruited for before,” said Sparks. “It was the new location and the different skill sets that were the difficult tasks.” Until last year, the recruiting function of Deloitte was undertaken at each of its 21 offices, as part of the HR function, with no centralised co-ordination of recruitment.

Recruitment process outsourcing firm Alexander Mann Solutions (AMS) had been working with Deloitte since 2005.

Client director at AMS Ishpal Bansal told Recruiter that when Deloitte approached AMS regarding the HRTP, the AMS onsite team were already integrated within Deloitte, so there were always going to be emotional challenges.

He explained: “There were bound to be a number of roles which would cease to exist following the reorganisation due to better efficiencies, and as, by now, the AMS team were viewed as Deloitte employees, any redundancies would be affecting their colleagues.”

The Solution

Bansal admitted that it was a frantic period for all of the AMS onsite team, which at its peak had up to 45 members. “The first phase of the project was to review the existing internal population and where possible promote or retrain skills internally. Although this process was successful we still needed to recruit 21 employees to expand the total [service centre] team to 32 people. Based on the successful internal moves, we were able to recruit a number of people into entry level positions to complete the structure. However, specific skills were also required.”

“The new skills we needed were call-centre type roles,” said Sparks. An employee services team also had to have knowledge of various employment-related issues. In addition, a team was needed to focus on onboarding for both experienced hires and graduates as well as temps and contractors. To achieve the recruitment cost savings that Deloitte was after in filling the HRTP roles, Bansal and his team were looking to fill as many of the positions as possible directly - without additional costs of a third-party agency. “As well as placing adverts, locally and on job boards, we carried out a certain amount of low-level headhunting,” he explained. “We then had to carry out a full-on selection process. We planned on seven full selection days, with a maximum of 12 candidates per day and three interviews per hire.” Sparks was particularly impressed with the assessment structure for prospective candidates. “AMS were hiring at the same time as rolling out the shared service centre, meaning that ‘onboarding’ was taking place simultaneously.” Bansal said that his team worked day and night during this period. “From 18 August to 2 September 2008, we saw 70 people during the selection days, with 21 offers made which were all accepted.” Contingency planning ensured that two drop-outs during the process could be handled and the roles refilled, as alternatives were available.

“The training of the team was scheduled for 6 October 2008, due to run for a month, with various pilots in the firm going live during the course of October. This put enormous pressure on the team as given the usual four weeks notice of candidates, most had to be moved through the assessment centres in a four-week period from application,” explained Bansal. “The results for Deloitte were a low-cost, high delivery operation,” said Sparks. Bansal added: “With 19 hires directly through AMS, one referral and one internal candidate, we must have saved the company thousands of pounds.”

Lessons learned
Engagement: The key to success is to have all parties engaged and kept up-to-date with regular updates
Planning: Ensuring there was a structured process right through from vacancy approval, candidate attraction and sourcing, interview and assessment structure,
through to offer management. Having pre-approved offers in order to avoid unnecessary delays in making the right offers and getting the candidates started within
the planned timescales
Contingencies: Contingency planning is absolutely critical to the success of a project of this size. Risks had been discussed to ensure processes had been
defined to account for these situations