Project example :

"Talent Acquisition Manager
at an IT company"

Talent Acquisition Manager at an IT group

The client was a well-known American IT company. The task for me as Talent Acquisition Manager was recruiting for Tech and Sales in an EMEA Talent Acquisition Team, i.e. an international recruiting team for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Africa. International recruiting in this case meant that the candidates the client was recruiting for the European matrix organisation would be from Germany. So it could be that the Hiring Manager was based in England or the Netherlands, but the employee was hired for the company in Germany. The cooperation with recruitment consultancies was very slow. Therefore as Talent Acquisition Manager, I was tasked with speeding up the recruiting process.

Project »Talent Acquisition Manager«

The requirements for recruiting in matrix organisations are generally particularly complex. Often the decision-maker for recruitment abroad has different ideas about the suitable candidate to those of the local management in Germany. A headhunter in England also works differently to recruitment consultancies in Germany. In England for example, employees change jobs far more frequently. Therefore the market there is much busier and the recruitment consultants are also too demanding for German tastes. Since the client was very international, as well as having a high recruitment volume, it needed an experienced Talent Acquisition Manager to be able to compete for skilled workers internationally.

The status quo at the outset

The client had worked with a number of different executive search consultancies. Some of the executive search consultancies were retained and the client paid a retainer for their research. Others had been working on a purely performance-based basis. But performance-based searches sometimes run much longer. Now the company was looking for a Talent Acquisition Manager who himself came via executive search and could bring in his experience from personnel consulting. The idea was to bring more speed into the talent search. As Talent Acquisition Manager, I was to recruit candidates through direct approach. If the recruitment consultancies were not fast enough in their approach, I talked directly with candidates at the target companies myself.

My tasks in the project were:

Commissioning and management of executive search consultancies
Coordination of market research with personnel consultancies
Direct contact by telephone
Placement of job advertisements
Coordination of active sourcing
Screening of application documents
Coordination of profiles with the Hiring Manager
Scheduling of interviews and travel expense accounting
Conducting interviews

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Course of the project

I worked as a Talent Acquisition Manager at the client's site and I contacted executive search consultancies and agencies. My task was to negotiate the recruitment conditions with the recruitment consultancies. Then I ensured that the target companies were clearly identified and that a list detailing these was well prepared. I also checked whether a structured approach had been made to possible candidates on the market.

Furthermore, I screened incoming applications and coordinated them with the Hiring Manager. Then further down the road in the course of the project, I accompanied the applicants through the process and conducted interviews. As a Talent Acquisition Manager, I’m used to a fast pace. So candidates were quickly invited for interviews and guided through the process. In the end, it was the successful implementation that counted, i.e. how many candidates signed the employment contract.

» Often the problem is that headhunters do not create target company lists carefully. Not all targets are identified or potential candidates are not approached in a structured way. My job as Talent Acquisition Manager is to follow up on this. «

Lars Schott, HR Manager

International Talent Acquisition Team

Since the client was international it was decided, for example in the United States, that a candidate would be hired in Europe. The candidate could then work in Frankfurt, London or Paris. The German unit then had to be quick in recruiting, for example so that headcounts were not located in the English organisation. From the German perspective, this is an unequal competition because candidates can be bought much more cheaply in Hungary or Poland for instance; or the candidates in Ireland or England have shorter notice periods – and with that being the case are more readily available and the position can be filled quicker. In this respect, it was important for the client to hire an experienced Talent Acquisition Manager as an Interim Manager in order to be well positioned in this international competition.

Recruit of high volumes

The client continued to have a very high volume of open vacancies. Sometimes I worked on 25 positions at the same time. It is important to develop the right search strategy for each position and to coordinate it with the business. That is my expertise. Often an ad-supported search on StepStone is enough. Other search assignments are handled by the active sourcing team via Xing or LinkedIn. If active sourcing takes too long or is not promising, personnel consultancies are commissioned. If there are enough applicants on the market, a recruitment consultancy can be used in a performance-based approach. If there is only a select group of applicants, then the assignment is given exclusively to a recruitment consultancy and a retainer is paid for the research.

A proven track record

My expertise as Talent Acquisition Manager on this project was to get the recruiting priorities right and keep the ball rolling on a variety of projects. Through my experience in executive search, the client was in a strong position for optimally negotiating the contracts for the successful candidates with the recruitment consultancies. We then identified "preferred suppliers" among these recruiters and established a close working relationship with these partners. In the process, we were also able to enforce performance-based conditions for the recruitment agency.