Case Study - Permanent Employee Recruitment

Problem

With some recruitment contracts, two questions coincide. First and most urgent is: How do you find the right person for the job in a short period of time? The second, and initially still subordinate one is: How should this person be integrated into the company? As a freelance consultant or as a permanent employee at the core of the business?

Our client from the steel industry was also facing both these problems. At first they tried on their own to find the right HSE manager for a project in Saudi Arabia. Time was of the essence: the Saudi Arabian contractor had already turned down two of their HSE recruits.

In the process, it became clear that both parties had different views of HSE culture. For our client, HSE was more of a pragmatic concern connected to an individual project. By contrast, for the end client - whose parent firm operates in the petrochemical industry - HSE plays a strategic role that extends beyond the individual project.

Solution

By the time the client contacted us, time pressure was great - the position had to be filled as quickly as possible. In searching for the right candidate, we combined two sourcing channels: on the one hand, we received a number of promising CVs through online campaigns we had launched in Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries. On the other, we searched our own network to see who would be right for the job.

From a short-list, one candidate stood out: an HSE specialist who was flexible and, despite his young age, already had years of international HSE experience - also in the highly regulated offshore industry.

Apart from determining his contractual status, the first problem was solved with this candidate: the ongoing project was no longer threatened by the non-acceptance of the HSE manager.

In addition, by succeeding in advising the client to hire the candidate as an employee, the corner stone was laid for solving the second, longer-term problem: changing company culture when it comes to implementing HSE processes and standards beyond the individual project calls for a longer-term engagement - and thus also the right employment perspective.