Facilities Management Recruitment Support

Geographical footprint: UK-wide

Number of employees: 53,500

Turnover: £2.3 billion

Background & Challenge

We are proud to have worked with a leading facilities management organisation since 2014, supporting them in recruiting staff to work on their client sites. Having shown strong growth with their hard FM services across healthcare, defence, government, justice and more, we have become their recruitment supplier of choice across all verticals.

As their chosen recruitment partner we are often based on our client’s site, in direct contact with (and accountable to) both organisations. This required excellent communication skills and full integration into both clients’ teams and locations.

An added challenge is presented by working in the FM market, where margins are typically narrow, with budgets needing to be carefully managed. It’s not unusual for pay rates to be lower than market value, meaning that recruitment in this area is particularly testing.

Solution

Our extensive experience in the FM sector meant that we were very aware of the market issues faced by our clients. High-pressure positions, low rates, and time-critical, roles came with common problems we’ve faced and overcome with customers previously.

Carbon60 appointed a dedicated Account Manager to take care of all requirements across the whole of the UK. This would ensure consistency and outstanding customer care, regardless of location or requirement. Playing an integral part in their recruitment strategy, our Account Manager typically oversees between five and eight live roles at any one time.

Where high volumes of hires are required at one time, our Account Manager will engage with the FM consultants at each of our national branches and/or our Central Resourcing Centre.

Our Account Team also worked hard to build a strong relationship. This has seen us gain a deep understanding of not only their hiring needs and role requirements, but departmental and company culture and how it fits into the overarching vision, mission, and values. We’ve been able to incorporate this information into a vacancy brief which is shared with everyone involved in the contract and means we can more efficiently identify the most suitable candidates.

Additionally, we identified areas in which we could provide further value. We deliver insight on the current market and pay rates and have implemented measures for managing the candidate journey to ensure candidates start and both candidate and employer are satisfied.

Outcome

Our relationship with our client has been highly successful for the past six years. This is largely down to our assigning of an Account Manager who has been able to ensure a consistently high level of customer service. When issues have arisen, we’ve been able to resolve them quickly and professionally which has helped to strengthen our relationship further. As a result, we’ve received a lot of internal referrals to several teams within their business.

As part of our support for vaccine development and rollout during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have proudly provided several key technical roles to pharma clients of our customers.

While the organisation already had a strong corporate identity, we hope our strategy and expertise in focusing on the candidate journey have contributed to improving it.

We’ve been able to go far beyond a purely transactional relationship and have provided insights such as market analytics, geographical skillset hot spots, salary surveys and management information which has helped to set rates and margins. We’ve further been able to highlight changes in candidate expectations, such as increased flexibility, initiatives for improving work/life balance, benefits, incentives, etc., many of which have helped them to secure FM talent despite the sometimes lower-than-average rates. This helped our client to work within strict and tight budgets.

Using technology like SourceBreaker and Daxtra has helped us fill long-term, business-critical roles across the UK, but especially in Ireland. Some of our statistics for 2020/21 include: