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The situation
One of our global pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical clients, whom we had worked with a lot in the UK, Belgium and Europe were recruiting specifically for a quality manager and RP. They wanted someone who was fluent in Czech and English to be based on-site in Czechia.
The internal TA (Talent Acquisition) team and local agencies had worked on the role for a couple of months and had struggled to find anyone with the right level of experience. The manager had begun to lose trust in agencies, he had been told that they were being proactive and were headhunting the right talent, but they still hadn’t submitted any candidates that were worth interviewing.
Unfortunately, the position went unfilled for several months. Because an aspect of this role was to sign off products for distribution, it meant that personnel from other business units within the company were tasked with doing so remotely, therefore, increasing their workload.
The Hobson Prior solution
The first thing we did was to arrange a call with the manager to gain a full definition of the role, understand the culture of the company and the country of Czechia as we hadn’t worked in this area before.
We then implemented a targeted approach of headhunting people with the right skillsets based in Czechia, even if they were not interested in the position we were able to network with them and gain referrals of people with a similar skillset based in Czechia. Quite quickly, we were able to create a network of talented people within the Czech Republic with the right skillset, experience and language skills.
After building a picture of the talent in Czechia, we understood that someone with the right skillset would have a longer notice period. From networking, we came across a consultant that would be perfect on an interim basis and made this suggestion to the manager.
The result
Firstly, we secured them a contractor on a 6-month contract, this allowed the client to release the strain from other business units and have someone on the site releasing products.
We were then able to continue our targeted approach to secure the right person on a permanent basis, which we did. The contractor stayed with the business to complete a handover and then received two 6-month contract extensions to help the local site with other projects where they had skill gaps.
We were able to rebuild the trust of the manager, he was pleased with our delivery and came directly to us with an identical scenario in Hungary – we followed the same targeted approach and were successful again. We have now teamed up with him as his recruitment partner for Eastern Europe.
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