Case study: Empowering a candidate's career progression by MAKING recruitment happen

A hiring manager that I had worked with previously was being made redundant. After fifteen years in the same position with the same company, he had a choice to either move his young family to a new country or take redundancy; he chose the latter.

Finding a job can be daunting for anyone, let alone someone who hadn’t needed to for fifteen years. He started by contacting agencies he had relied on as a hiring manager, which led him to Hobson Prior, who he'd worked with before. He explained his situation with his career and that he'd like three months to spend with his family before starting something new.

When he restarted his search, the market was quiet, with only a handful of opportunities at his level, which weren't right for different reasons; salary, location, dosage form.

I had a very honest conversation with him and suggested to him that we change tact and start being more proactive to make things happen.

I already had an idea of what he was specifically looking for, so I created a spreadsheet of companies that met the majority of all the points he wanted. I marked next to each company whether I had an existing relationship with them or whether I was contacting them speculatively. I asked him to highlight any he didn’t want me to approach; i.e. had previous bad experiences or had already applied – we removed these companies, which created the final shortlist.

I started to work my way through the list, making notes next to each company on my progress – I shared this document with him at the end of each week to keep him posted on my progress.

Each time a company expressed an interest in seeing his details, he and I would have a conversation about what they were looking for and whether he would like to apply or not. The fact that we put some effort into compiling a list of relevant companies meant that in this case, the interest was always mutual.

In the space of 6 weeks of speculative approaches to existing and new potential clients, he went from having no job opportunity to having three job offers to consider.

He chose the right role for him and after two years, he has recently been promoted and still works with Hobson Prior as his primary QA recruiter.