Our client, the Italian subsidiary of one of the world’s largest in-vitro diagnostics companies, had acquired a company in genetic testing. It therefore needed to build a sales team as soon as possible in order to promote the new genetics portfolio to the Italian market.
Despite working with two of the world’s largest recruitment agencies, they were not getting the kinds of profiles they needed.
The challenge
This client was a company we had been trying to work with for some time and during one of our regular business development calls, they talked about the need for these highly specialised sales people, though said they were collaborating with these other agencies and therefore couldn’t work with us.
Given the niche focus of the way our teams are structured, we had recruiters with specific candidate networks in the exact area this client needed. We were able to convince them to review one of their CVs, which was a perfect fit, and we were therefore invited onto the project.
However, we knew finding the full team of eight people with the right experience was going to be a challenge. This is because the kind of technology these people would be selling is usually developed and sold by large multinational companies rather than smaller local companies and people working in this field are used to the perks larger companies can provide.
Our process
We had worked in this specific market for nine years so already had a good understanding of the market, the candidates needed, and where they might already be working.
We assigned two recruiters to the project who first mapped the market to generate a list of all relevant candidates to approach.
In addition to covering skills and qualifications, our screening process focused on the motivations of the candidates to make sure we were presenting the ones most interested in the advantages a smaller company could provide, such as a different company culture and working environment, a place where they would have a voice rather than just be a number, and somewhere they could grow faster professionally.
We ultimately sent the client the four best candidates for each role within eight working days.
The outcome
We ultimately placed all eight roles with a 100% retention rate. The candidates are all happy with their roles, and the client’s project to build the new genetics line is going well.
They stopped working with the global recruitment agencies and come to us now when they need any new staff.