Case Study: Helping our clients set up facilities in Europe to help combat Brexit

One of our global pharmaceutical clients based in the UK contacted us for our support on a specific European project. At the time, they manufactured their products outside of Europe, completed QP release in the UK before distributing throughout Europe. 65% of their products were distributed throughout Europe – In the event of Brexit, all products released in the UK would potentially need to be rereleased when they cross the border into the EU.

Understanding that this could potentially lead to them losing business to EU based companies, our client wanted to implement a proactive plan to combat future issues that could arise from Brexit. That solution was to open two sites in Europe, one QP office in Belgium to complete European QP release and a distribution centre based in Poland. Our client had specific plans in place with project milestones and headcount for each of those stages, But hadn’t ever hired anyone in Europe previously.

Firstly, we gained a detailed briefing from the client on; the project plans, milestones, locations and why all these decisions had been made – This gave our team a great understanding of the business and project to allow us to sell it to candidates effectively.

He then outlined to us more specifically about the hiring plans, he explained to us that this was a project that would run for roughly 2 years and he expected up to 40 new hires of both contract and permanent members of staff including consultancy support for things like validation. He explained the skill sets, level of experience, location, language skills, contract or permanent and what the expected hiring dates would be for each position.

After digesting all of this information, our Quality team began to proactively talent pool in the specific areas he had mentioned – we initially started speaking with people inside our network that would consider opportunities in Europe. We then began a targeted approach of headhunting local talent to build our network in-country, as we understood that this was where the main bulk of permanent hires would come from.

We opted to conduct a lot of this work upfront, so as each milestone was hit and new hires were required we already had a relevant shortlist of candidates.

Because of our team’s proactive approach, we were able to support our client fully with the delivery of their project, on time and under budget. We were successful in helping them hire 15 contract and 10 permanent employees across the two sites over the two-year project.

These positions were; 6 QA Officers, 4 QA Specialists, 2 QA Managers, 4 QPs, 3 RPs, 1 Head of Quality & 5 Senior QA Consultants.

The client was impressed with our delivery within Quality in the early stages of this project, that they then worked with other managers in the business to give us access to other areas of the project.

We went on to make successful contract and permanent placements within Regulatory, Technical Operations & Production.

To learn more about our recruitment solutions, you can view our employers section or upload a job description to our client services team.