The Role : Lead Designer - Infotainment

The Hiring Circumstance –  This automotive manufacturer had been trying to hire a lead designer for over a year, only to find that candidates came up short on the skills required.  In the absence of the right level of skills and experience in-house to design and develop this important and exciting new feature for a forthcoming new model, the company was forced to outsource the project to an external consultancy.

The Strategy – The company had advertised in the national media on four occasions over a twelve month period, together with campaigns in a specialist publication and using several on-line recruitment sites.  They had also briefed their recruitment agency supply chain, receiving several short-lists.

The Consequence –  The skills sought were very specific and quite rare.  The hiring activity had, however, produced 28 candidates for interview over the year that the position had remained open.  The manager invested many hours interviewing candidates, but each came up short on either their experience of electronics or mechanical engineering.

The cost of the advertising came to almost £50,000 without success.  The biggest cost, however, was the near £30,000 per month it was costing to outsource the work to the external consultancy.

The company eventually went through a piece of specialist hiring consultancy that examined why the hiring activity was failing.  The root cause of the hiring problem revealed was so simple, but it had eluded a team of very capable people, simply because they had been looking at the issue from purely an internal perspective.

The initial specification provided to HR would have required someone to have worked  for 2-3 years in a mechanical engineering discipline then, having had a change of heart, gone back down one or two pay grades to then re-train in an electronics discipline and work their way back up again; all of this whilst coincidentally having held a passion for pioneering new infotainment technology within a competitor company.

Once the ‘search universe’ for the candidates had been articulated as part of the discovery process, it became immediately obvious that the company were looking for two people as opposed to one.   These were relatively easily recruited by revisiting the previous applicants.

The project was brought back in-house for the remaining two years of the project lifecycle.  This manager reported that this 'best practice' activity, even without the saving of continued advertising costs, represented a considerable overhead reduction, and enabled him to bring in another seven high-level contract engineers  for this and another project.

The Saving - £720K in consultancy fees + boosted productivity

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