“We had 300 recruitment suppliers – now we’ve got our hiring under control”
To say Thales Group has a complex business model would be an understatement. The multinational systems engineering business provides services to the aerospace, defence, transportation, security and space sectors and generates annual revenues of around £10 billion. Every day its 65,000 global employees operate under multiple guises to deliver projects for thousands of customers worldwide. And when Jason West became UK director of resourcing in 2008, it was evident that Thales’ approach to resourcing was just as comprehensive.
“Thales had a really good handle on its permanent employees and graduates, but for contractors and temps – what we call contingent – there was more limited visibility of the skills employed within the business,” he says.
Recruitment was outsourced to two RPO providers, one for permanent, fixed term and graduate, the other for contingent. However, planning and hiring responsibility rested within multiple individual business units, just three of which had a common resource planning process.
“Finance, HR, procurement, IT and security all had their own separate processes, all managed in silos,” says West. “At a working level, customer projects were delivered on time but with over 300 third-party agency suppliers, it was hard to track costs.” It’s a situation that is not uncommon for many organisations, West says: “It’s often difficult to get to the data. Typically, no one function holds complete data on contingent resources, so you have to go digging for it before you can start your analysis.”
To get to grips with resourcing practices and establish a talent planning proposal for the years ahead, West launched a four-week analysis project. Initial results revealed that the business could save millions in reduced agency fees by rationalising suppliers under a single managed service provider. “Suddenly, we had a compelling case for change,” West says.
And so a multi-functional project team was formed to create a single supply chain for contingent resources. “The project took nine months to deliver but six years on, we’ve secured multiple millions in cashable savings,” he says.
“We found large numbers of old vacancies, internal mobility levels well below expectations and a significant proportion of hires leaving before they’d reached two years’ service,” says West. Using the same multi-functional approach, a strategy was designed that would “secure the capability the business needs, when and where it needs it”.
“We made a conscious decision to engage people from different parts of the business because otherwise it would become an HR initiative rather than a business strategy,” West says.
Thales introduced coaching sessions for hiring managers and leadership teams to make optimal resourcing decisions, and an in-house research team was formed to find candidates to fill critical roles. Today, all the UK’s business units share a common resource planning model.
Internal mobility has tripled, attrition decreased by 75 per cent in the first two years, hard-to-fill vacancies have decreased by 90 per cent and the team delivers 98 per cent of hires direct.
Katherine Burrage, who now heads up UK resourcing after West became director of consultancy Integrated Resourcing, says her team is now developing the strategy further to align resourcing with talent management.
“It’s been great to take key lessons from the UK resourcing journey to support the business in establishing a global resourcing function,” she says.