Case study
Solving MSD talent acquisition challenges in a tight timeframe
Challenges
MSD is an innovative, global leader in healthcare, with an extensive presence in Europe. Recently, MSD decided to create a new Business Support Center (BSC) in Prague, Czech Republic to provide centralized support across all EMEA finance functions. To do that, the company needed to attract around 300 new employees to a new location, with advanced proficiency required in eight European languages plus Arabic.
For this business-critical project, MSD turned to Cielo to provide a project RPO solution that would meet its hiring needs for the new Purchase to Pay, Order to Cash, Operational Excellence, Financial Planning & Analysis teams, and part of the Accounts to Report team.
MSD and Cielo needed to work fast to make sure the new BSC would be staffed and functional on time. Cielo was up to the challenge.
Impact by the numbers
Offer rejection rate
Fewer than 10% of offers were rejected, indicating excellent matching.
Time to hire
An average time to hire of just 35 days across the partnership.
Finance professionals hired
More than 250 finance professionals were hired in a highly competitive market.
Solutions
Given the need for accelerated hiring, Cielo immediately put in place a recruitment process that was optimized for the urgent nature of the solution. Phone interviews were followed by a single face-to-face interview involving all decision-makers, creating a shortened yet still robust process.
Due to the crowded and highly competitive nature of the Czech jobs market, alongside a multi-channel attraction campaign, open days were organized to attract a high volume of candidates. This enabled hiring managers to meet candidates on the day and allowed candidates to experience the reality of working life at the BSC, reducing time to hire. An optimized offer process was also put in place to reduce offer rejection.
The strong existing referral program was further promoted internally, allowing Cielo to bring in known candidates already recommended by the business. Hiring manager training workshops on the power of personal networks, with managers encouraged to reach out to previous employees, embedding the mantra that “the best talent is the talent you’ve already worked with.”
With Cielo’s team fully embedded in the partnership, an excellent relationship was forged on-site with MSD. That presence and alignment fostered an in-depth understanding of MSD’s present and future hiring needs. Using our local market knowledge, Cielo created talent pipelines for roles and language skills that would be required in future phases of the project.
MSDThe cooperation from Cielo has been outstanding and communications very well managed with our MSD leadership team.
Results
The MSD Business Support Center is now known in the market as the fastest-growing shared services centre in the Czech Republic. When the Cielo team began work in February 2017, the project was four months and almost 80 hires behind its targets due to a delayed kick off. By November 2017, the company was only 20 hires behind schedule, and had gotten completely back on track – even ahead of the target – by January 2018.
The strong referral program that was promoted internally ended up accounting for 40% of our hires. The program also led to an interview-to-offer ratio that was almost 1:1 and the optimized offer process led to an offer rejection rate of less than 10%. Combined with the shortened recruitment process, open days and referral scheme, time to hire was only 35 days.
Although the original requirement was to recruit staff with advanced proficiency in one (or more) of eight European languages plus Arabic, the MSD BSC is now home to over 30 different nationalities, with 35 unique languages spoken.
Despite the high attrition levels often seen in SSCs, only four of 252 hires have left (1.7%) in the year since the project began – an excellent marker of quality of hire. As the project moves toward a highly successful completion, Cielo is now also creating promotional material for a marketing project that includes video testimonials of recent hires, which will help MSD continue to attract the best talent possible at its new location well into the future.
"It has been a great pleasure to partner with Cielo for our Finance BSC recruitment. The cooperation from Cielo has been outstanding and communications very well managed with our MSD leadership team. This excellent relationship has significantly helped us to be highly successful in hiring 300 finance professionals in a very competitive labor market in Prague across just 11 months – a very challenging timeline," said Jan Kohout, Executive Director, EMEA Business Services Center at MSD.
About the client
MSD
MSD is an innovative, global leader in healthcare, with an extensive presence in Europe. They use the power of leading-edge science to save and improve lives around the world. For more than 130 years, MSD has brought hope to humanity through the development of important medicines and vaccines.
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