Case Study: Recruiting A UK-Wide SC-Cleared Engineering Team For a Leading Technology & Services Provider

The client’s challenge…

We had successfully been working with this client for a few years, previously securing 7 ad hoc professionals across their organisation.

For this recruitment project, they needed to secure multiple professionals to build out a new team of deployment engineers within a short period of time, following increased client demand. The right mix of technical skills was critical, but equally, the new hires needed to work well as a team and have good soft skills to communicate and manage multiple clients and stakeholders effectively.

With several of the provider’s clients operating within the military and nuclear defence sectors, the engineers had to be highly trusted and capable of passing detailed SC and additional clearance levels. The client also required professionals who were happy with travelling to multiple sites in remote locations each week.

Our actions…

We knew that the security clearance process during onboarding would make the overall process longer. Therefore, we prioritised acting quickly to secure the talent this client required. This included scaling the number of our consultants dedicated to working on this client’s recruitment.

We leveraged our established database to identify suitable deployment engineers who were based near one of the client’s multiple UK site locations. After this, we undertook an outreach campaign, contacting these candidates to ascertain their availability and suitability for the role.

Sourcing the engineers required significant planning, as we had to identify candidates that matched the extensive criteria from the client, and check they would be happy to go through enhanced security checks.

Once we identified suitable candidates, we supported the interview process closely by helping to organise back-to-back interview days each week, alongside running assessment days onsite.

Once the job offers were accepted, we prepared each new starter for SC and additional clearances. These additional vetting procedures can be intrusive and cause delays, so we made sure to keep in close contact with all new hires during this process.

The outcomes…

Within 6 weeks of the national technology and services provider informing us that they required help building out a team of UK-wide deployment engineers, we had successfully offered and secured 11 professionals. Due to enhanced security checks, there was a longer period before all engineers were onsite; however, by acting quickly at the start, the provider did not experience any delays in getting support out to their clients.

We’re delighted with the solid partnership we have formed with this provider. With our proven experience of providing scalable recruitment solutions for complex hiring campaigns, we continue to work with them as their technical recruitment partner of choice.