2021 was a year of record-breaking performance and growth for Cielo, the world’s leading Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider. We helped more companies than ever navigate the increasingly complex talent environment, providing talent acquisition and retention strategy and support. Through our best-in-class services and ever-evolving solutions, we placed 65% more people in new careers on behalf of our clients last year. We expanded and strengthened our global reach and the scope of our strategic services to meet our clients’ current and future needs.
“The past year is surely one to remember for Cielo and our teams around the world. No one has won more, new complex RPO deals while retaining current partnerships than we have in the last 12 months –and this is a testament to the skill, expertise and tireless dedication of our employees. Not only are we delivering impactful day-to-day recruitment services, but we’ve earned the trust to support our existing clients with more strategic solutions across the entire talent value chain,” said Sue Marks, CEO and Founder of Cielo. “As unique challenges and opportunities arose, our team’s dedication, expertise and commitment to service excellence have led our clients to business success. It is a privilege to work with each of you.”
As we turn another chapter, we are celebrating the collective achievements of our committed Cielo teams, trusted clients and industry partners.
Creating a Positive Workplace by Focusing on Our People
We continue to strengthen our inclusive culture and workplace where our employees globally can grow both personally and professionally. Creating a company and culture where people want to work, in combination with the increased need from our clients, allowed us to add over 1,000 employees to the Cielo community and make more than 700 internal moves – while winning several top workplace awards along the way.
To support our global employees in reaching their full potential, we remain dedicated to providing development, guidance and tools to help them get there. Employees across all career stages seized the many educational opportunities, engaging in over 30,000 hours of learning! For our people managers, we held monthly peer-to-peer learning sessions to develop and strengthen their leadership skills.
We held bi-monthly events to foster dialogue among team members to encourage shared learning and appreciation of the unique experiences of our people. Expanding on our existing employee resource groups, we established a comprehensive set of internal councils that allow individuals around the world to participate in our journey toward being a more diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace.
Our communications approach evolved to ensure we supply employees with information when they need it and where they want it. This has led to record employee engagement scores, building a stronger sense of connection to Cielo in the process – even with everyone working remotely.
Supplying Timely TA Strategies to Win in a Competitive Market
Like never before, companies are acknowledging the need for RPO’s innovative, scalable talent acquisition solutions to remain competitive and deliver business results. This led to immense global demand for Cielo’s Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) expertise:
- To fill mission-critical medical roles and build a lasting talent pipeline, we partnered with Tufts Medical Center in North America to create a new recruitment strategy leveraging people, process and technology – earning us a business partnership excellence award.
- With comprehensive testing protocols essential to reducing the spread of COVID-19, we partnered with our global medical technology client with recruitment across Europe, enabling them to continue the rapid manufacturing and distribution of testing swabs throughout the pandemic.
- When a company virtually unknown in Colombia looked to expand, our localized talent acquisition strategies in LATAM helped the business successfully launch a delivery services center and attract a highly sought-after talent pool in just eight weeks.
- For safe COVID-19 vaccine distribution, we partnered with Sanofi in Asia to enable the company to quickly build up a manufacturing and quality control capability larger than ever before.
- To create a sustainable talent pipeline and ensure long-term business success, we partnered with an international biopharmaceutical company on a global scale to create a future-proofed TA strategy framework with a focus on DEI, internal mobility and early talent.
Expanding Value-Add Services to Meet Record Demand
Companies seeking to attract and retain top talent saw immense value beyond our RPO solutions, driving the expansion of our additional service offerings, including executive search, total talent acquisition, and our consulting services within employer branding, technology and DEI. To meet the increase in demand and expectations, many of our teams grew not only in size and footprint but added services too.
- Employer Brand Practice expanded its creative, digital, social media and recruitment marketing services to deliver brand strategy and communications support. The team’s outstanding partnerships with Becton Dickinson, Agilent and ASM were honored with three Employer Brand Marketing Awards, with their work with ASM also winning a TIARA Talent Solutions Award. The practice’s work in the recruitment marketing and employer branding space internationally was also celebrated with a Talent Brandie.
- Companies across the globe continue to reexamine how they hire leaders, leading to a surge in the need for Executive Search support. With more global clients seeking rapid deployment to meet quick hiring turnaround, Executive Search added more sector experts and expanded in Asia.
- Technology Consulting saw increased demand from businesses looking to transform their talent acquisition with comprehensive and forward-looking strategies, leading technologies, best business processes, and smooth deployments. We received the iCIMS Partner of the Year award in 2021, which reflects our proven command in processes and technology.
- To better assist our clients on their unique DEI journeys and ensure equitable hiring practices, we created a new structure and appointed a new leader that further expands upon our existing DEI strategy services. We are working with businesses to assess, benchmark, design and implement strategic, measurable and effective plans tailored to support each company’s DEI goals through their talent acquisition strategy.
- Total Talent Acquisition remains a reliable solution for companies to recruit and manage all of their talent, both permanent and contingent. We helped a long-time client recruit for a project requiring thousands of contingent staff across multiple locations to support COVID-19 vaccine distribution.
Delivering Tech-Enabled RPO to Future-Proof TA for our Clients
The right technology, balanced with people and process, remains pivotal to ensuring talent acquisition strategies and investments match shifting candidate expectations and business needs. In early 2021, we released the next evolution of Cielo TalentCloud, a flexible platform designed to deliver great experiences, elevate meaningful insights, and accelerate recruiting performance. Combined with the expertise of Cielo’s global RPO teams, this reimagined technology platform elevates our clients’ existing technology strategies to achieve their vision. The value and superior, experience-led results that Cielo TalentCloud offers have been recognized by our client partners and the HRO Today Association, naming us a finalist for Innovation in HR Technology.
“Cielo dominates the RPO technology space: not only thanks to our great technology team but due to the rapid implementation and adoption of our system-wide enterprise tech platform. All this to say, we have the largest, pre-configured technology platform through Cielo TalentCloud that will continue to help us win more business and strategic implementation work,” said Marissa Geist, Chief Operating Officer at Cielo.
Through global RPO services and the Cielo TalentCloud platform, we continue to work with and for our clients to create custom talent acquisition solutions that deliver impactful hiring outcomes.
Earning Top Analyst Rankings to Validate Cielo’s Unmatched Approach
Cielo’s dedication to delivering quality, innovation and results to clients was acknowledged with several top analyst rankings in 2021:
- For nine consecutive years, we’ve been named a Leader on Everest Group’s global RPO PEAK Matrix.
- Cielo was identified as a Leader on Everest Group’s North America RPO PEAK Matrix for the third year in a row.
- NelsonHall named Cielo as a Leader in all categories of the NEAT vendor evaluation for RPO and Total Talent for the seventh consecutive year.
- Cielo was honored with three top awards from HRO Baker’s Dozen: No. 1 overall global RPO provider (two years in a row), No. 1 RPO provider in healthcare (eight straight years), and No. 1 RPO in EMEA.
More and more companies are seeing the value in the innovation and expertise that an external strategic talent partner brings. Amid arguably the most demanding year in our lifetimes for talent acquisition teams worldwide, Cielo exceeded expectations. We earned industry-breaking NPS scores and retained 95% of revenue across service lines, demonstrating the strong solutions our clients receive. With our team’s dedication to our client partners and each other, we look forward to another year of advancing talent acquisition strategies.
