Case Study: Supporting a Swedish Biotech expand into Switzerland through an acquisition

After a client we had worked with in Sweden acquired one of our other Swiss-based clients, they set about going through a big expansion in their Swiss offices. As we had pre-existing relationships with both parties, we offered our services as a Global Talent provider and utilised our candidate network to find suitable candidates in both locations.

One of their core priorities was to make sure they didn't encroach upon or lose the company culture of either company, but instead, blend them into a culture that worked for both companies under one new structure. This would be an important part of their employer branding within both locations.

After establishing contact with the new HR Business Partner in Basel, we highlighted that, due to our knowledge of both companies before the merger, we could easily provide candidates with information about the merger and explain how the client would take positive cultural pieces from both companies to ensure a seamless transition, without providing any concerns to prospective candidates. Our experience in developing employer branding propositions for our clients proved valuable throughout the recruitment process.

By using our existing candidate database, who were working at both companies, we were able to deep dive into the cultural pieces that they felt made them unique and used this as a selling point to prospective candidates who were interested in joining the company.

We were also able to use our on-site presence in Switzerland to meet both the client and candidate, in order to give a full picture of how the company was set up and how this would benefit the candidates as a long-term development opportunity.

By having regular contact with the HR Business partner, we were able to establish the key areas they were looking to expand in, provide them with salary benchmarking reports for the local area and also provide end-to-end candidate management to ensure the HR team were not overburdened with process management during the merger.

Overall, we have successfully placed 20 candidates to date since the merger, and are now one of their tier 1 suppliers for both permanent and interim recruitment in all of their global locations, in particular in their Swiss and Swedish offices.

Our client was able to make sufficient time to hold two final stage video interviews via our platform with the top candidates. They were extremely impressed with both candidates and released an offer to one of them.

This meant that within ten business days of the client briefing us on the role, we had an accepted offer from the candidate who then started roughly a week after contract acceptance.

Hobson Prior has now become this client’s first choice agency for QA and is in discussions to roll out our on-demand video interview service into other functions within their business.