direct sourcing case study: multinational healthcare company achieves €2 million in savings.
With a focus on elevating its employer brand and creating robust talent pools, a major healthcare company transforms how it sources contingent talent for hard-to-fill roles
finding specialized contingent talent in a tight labor market
The contingent workforce has become an important driver of innovation for this Fortune 500 healthcare company. Yet, despite being a globally recognized brand, the company was challenged to find and attract talent for its contract positions, let alone fill them quickly.
Most of the organization's open roles are for quality assurance, laboratory and regulatory affairs professionals — making them harder to fill. Many of these roles are highly specialized and very low-volume, meaning there is typically a limited number of potential applicants with the required skills and qualifications to do the job. As a result, each position requires a personalized approach to find qualified candidates.
Facing heavy regulations that vary from one country to another, the company is further limited by geography and can’t rely on sourcing internationally for these roles. Compounding the challenge even more was a general lack of awareness about the company’s opportunities for contract work.
Each of these factors contributed to a high cost of hire that wasn’t sustainable.
reaching the right people with the right message
To solve these challenges, the company partnered with Randstad Sourceright on a managed services program (MSP) with direct sourcing in Europe, driven by strong talent marketing and employer branding services.
With the goal of attracting candidates with the relevant skills, the company put a greater focus on talent marketing; namely, creating a strong talent brand that resonates with contingent talent and ensuring messages attract the interest of the niche and highly skilled talent it seeks.
To achieve this, Randstad Sourceright’s talent marketing team analyzed the company’s target audiences to identify the key drivers that would attract talent to a project role within the pharmaceutical industry. Based on this insight, a value proposition that is tailored for contingent was created. Also supporting the program are a branded candidate relationship management (CRM) platform, microsite and talent pool system.
Talent marketing support also includes the creation of advertising materials that were targeted specifically to contractors and designed with the goal of encouraging specialized talent to apply and register for the talent pool. These messages are woven across every candidate touch point, from paid advertising to direct sourcing communications, and at every point of the application and recruitment journey.
Focusing on purpose, the creative materials highlight the value of joining the company and making a real difference to its medical innovations, while showing how long-term assignments can help contractors advance their careers long term. Using advanced analytics, the talent marketing team segmented the audience by location and job title, while targeting those with relevant skills via job boards, Google search, Google Display and social media.
Building and maintaining pools of qualified and engaged contractors is key to filling new roles quickly and the success of any direct sourcing strategy. Through the talent marketing support services, the company optimized its talent pools, reducing the number of job families to better reflect how candidates see themselves and making it easier for recruiters to nurture these professionals, whether they are new registrants or those who come back to the talent pool to be redeployed.
The company also refreshed its talent pool microsites with more engaging copy and imagery specific to those job families to further engage talent with relevant content. And a robust email marketing strategy connects the client with prospective talent, invites them to join the company’s talent pools and sends regular updates and reminders to apply. These automated, yet personalized emails keep talent warm as more contract positions become available.
accessing high-quality contractors faster
Now in its second year of the direct sourcing program with Randstad Sourceright, the company is sourcing qualified contingent talent and improving its speed to hire — ensuring the business is able to access the skills it needs to drive innovation and growth.
Since implementation, 55% of contingent hires stem from the company’s talent marketing efforts, resulting in over 200 hires in one year. Moreover, the company adds more than 40 new registrants to its talent pools per day, with nearly 29,500 total professionals who are already vetted for recruiters to draw from as new projects open up. Through targeted emails to this talent pool, the company realizes an open rate of more than 50%, highlighting a significant level of engagement.
The combination of dynamic talent marketing and improved talent pool management has given the company the agility to find talent for its hard-to-fill and location-specific roles through direct sourcing, and to do so quickly.
Improving the speed to hire has also resulted in significant cost savings: to date, the company has saved more than €2 million by avoiding third-party agency fees that would have been incurred without direct sourcing.