Putting Candidate Experience First

The Challenge:

PGI recognized the need for real expertise in the recruitment process and wanted to take responsibilities away from the HR Manager and other Senior Managers. Prior to partnering with Bond, PGI’s attraction strategy was limited to posting job ads on their careers page and Indeed, and reaching out to recruitment agencies on their PSL only when necessary.

There was also a lack of recruitment capability internally and no established recruitment processes. This resulted in a reactive and ad response-based strategy, which struggled with delivery and had a lack of focus on candidate experience.

They enlisted the support of Bond, to bring recruitment capability inhouse and put candidate experience at the heart of their talent process to improve the overall candidate experience. They also needed to attract and recruit candidates with specific language skills for global projects.

The solution:

Bond were brought in to build an internal talent function from scratch and take ownership of the end-to-end hiring process. Through strong collaboration with PGI’s leadership team, Bond have been able to create a consistent interview process that ensures all candidates have the same experience.

Our proactive approach to candidate attraction phased out the agency usage, meaning 100% of hires have been directly sourced; which has proven to be very cost-effective for PGI.

In addition to candidate attraction, Bond also ran a number of different workshops: The five stage talent theory and a consultation into the Cost-of-Living Crisis, surveying and conducting one-on-one sessions with PGI employees to understand and address their concerns. As a result, PGI’s management group was able to offer financial, personal, and social support to employees.

Other project work included:

• Creating a candidate pack
• Evolving their recruitment marketing
• Creating interview templates
• Salary benchmarking across all functions
• Talent pooling & market mapping

The impact:

Hires were made in 8 global locations, including Hong Kong, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Tunisia, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK.

• 25 hires across all business functions, including C-suite positions
• 18 different language skills were hired into the team including: Vietnamese, Pashto, Yoruba, Korean, Ukranian, Swahili, Urdu, Igbo, Tunisian, Portuguese & Spanish
• Time to hire was reduced from 56 days to 14 days
• Time to offer was 8 days
• 56% of the new hires were female

Overall, Bond’s efforts not only improved the candidate experience at PGI but also led to key additions to the leadership team, including a new Operations Director and Finance Director. The recruitment of contractors with local knowledge and specific language skills also helped PGI support their global projects