Case Study: Helping our client hire the right person and reduce time spent recruiting

A long-term client of ours approached us to support them on a specific recruitment challenge. They were looking to urgently hire a QA Manager but during a global pandemic, time for everyone was limited. He was tasked with ensuring that his whole team were set up correctly from home, whilst continuing to hit all project milestone and targets – finding time to review CV’s and host interviews was impossible.

In the same breath, he stressed the importance of having this role filled sooner rather than later. As it stood, several team members were having to pick up the slack which was stretching the entire department. 

I took the time to explain to him the functionality of our on-demand video interview service, I went on to explain that we could run a tailored recruitment process that would suit his specific needs and that he would be able to view the progress of this in his own time. Essentially, he would spend less time recruiting but because of the time and effort we would dedicate, he would still be able to secure the right person.

He shared with me the job description and went into detail about what he was looking for; we agreed on specific interview questions and then I submitted a question to the manager via our video platform -asking him what it was like to work for this company, he recorded a short 45-second clip that we were then able to share with the applicants to give them a great understanding of the business culture.

Three members of the Hobson Prior QA team sourced the position for three days, and two of the consultants exhausted our network of relevant candidates. Whilst the other dedicated their time solely to headhunting new talent for this position. We qualified people based on the manager’s specific requirements, and then shared the job spec and short clip from the manager to make sure they had sufficient information. We shortlisted ten relevant candidates for the position, and we then had a project meeting to decide which top five candidates we would take to interview –we ended up interviewing six.

To add some consistency, I personally held the six video interviews over the course of a day. I rejected two applicants following the interviews, kept one back up and shared the top three with the manager via our video platform – he then had the freedom to review the videos in his own time, which he did over the weekend. 

Our client was able to make sufficient time to hold two final stage video interviews via our platform with the top candidates. He was 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.