Case Studies
Supporting A Household Name Business Through A Return To Office Announcement
Candidates sourced
Week consultation period
A household name in the retail industry was planning to enforce a 5-day return to the office policy across the organisation, including within their tech department. As such, they predicted that they would need to expand their list of suppliers to include more specialist recruitment agencies to offer consultation and support on the potential outcomes of this transition to fully onsite working.
The client's challenge...
The retail company was unsure about the outcome of their planned return to the office announcement; with concerns they may not be prepared to replace a number of highly skilled workers if they resigned. Therefore, 6 months before the scheduled announcement, the organisation started exploring options for more recruitment agency suppliers to support their talent acquisition team.
The company publicly advertised that they were conducting a tender exercise to identify the right suppliers. As we had successfully recruited highly skilled tech professionals for a number of large companies and household names in the retail space previously, we knew we would be an excellent addition to their list of suppliers. We applied to pitch for the tender, focusing on our reputation as an award-winning IT recruitment agency, our previous experience in recruiting great talent in the retail sector and implementing fair and diverse recruitment practices.
We were selected to pitch for the tender in which we further explained our various services, provided testimonials and discussed our extensive understanding of both hiring great tech talent in the retail sector and supporting recruitment campaigns. Soon after, we were appointed as a trusted supplier to the retailer.
After being added to the retailer’s list of suppliers, we wanted to use the time before the return to the office announcement as efficiently as possible. In order to help the organisation prepare for all eventualities following a return to the office announcement, we researched tech talent local to the organisation who would be a good fit for the business. We first established with the retail company’s talent acquisition team that that they would be looking for tech talent within a 30 minute drive radius of their headquarters and were particularly focused on engaging architecture and cloud technical talent from junior to leadership level.
Our actions...
With 6 months until the return to the office announcement was due, our team worked hard to prepare for a potential influx of hiring requirements if needed, collecting valuable insights on the local tech talent for the retailer to take forward. We placed a dedicated account manager onsite for a 6 week consultation period, in order to work directly with the hiring managers and stakeholders to understand their requirements and the internal company culture.
We worked with the client’s talent acquisition team to identify the main skills and roles within their current workforce and then explored with the team which skills would be most in-demand and difficult to source if needed.
Our team performed a sourcing exercise to identify active and passive candidates who lived close to the retailer’s headquarters. We created ecosystems of small candidate pools within our CRM database, tagging and labelling them according to particular skills/ roles/ seniority levels, so that if needed, we could easily identify which candidates could be approached for whichever role was required. This created a valuable source of insights for the organisation to utilise following the announcement of their new onsite working policy.
The outcomes...
By working proactively, our team were prepared with a database of 300+ candidates for a variety of core technical areas. Due to our extensive work in creating these ecosystems of relevant and skilled professionals, we possess lists of relevant and suitable candidates for any future role that comes through.
Whilst the announcement did not lead to many resignations within the tech team and our preparation to hire for a high number of roles was not needed, the client was thoroughly impressed with our ability to be proactive and provide excellent insights that can now inform their workforce planning going forward. We have become a trusted and valued supplier of the retailer, that has expressed intent to work with our team more extensively in the future for niche and specialist roles.
"We were pleased to offer this household name extensive assistance with their return to the office policy..."
Enforcing a return to the office policy can be controversial and risky, with an increased chance that a number of great professionals will resign from their role after an announcement is made. Thankfully for this retail organisation, the worst case scenario did not happen, however, the time our team spent on creating valuable candidate and workforce insights will come in very handy for their future recruitment campaigns.