Transforming Talent Acquisition for Smiths Medical

CLIENT CHALLENGE
With more than 7,500 employees (and growing) spread across six continents, Smiths Medical is a leading global provider of medical devices for the hospital, emergency, home and specialist environments. Despite more than 25 years of global growth, HR’s challenge in recent years has been the lack of a fully functional applicant tracking system, the need for a centralized and cost effective recruitment solution, and the expense of high agency usage. In fact, leadership found that more than 50% of the department’s spend was aligned to transactional recruitment, subsequently limiting HR’s ability to focus on business strategy and employee engagement.

Ultimately, Smiths Medical decided it did not possess the internal resources, skills or technologies necessary to handle recruitment in-house without increasing expenditures beyond budgetary means and/or implementing in a time-effective manner.

CREATING THE SOLUTION
Smiths Medical transitioned end-to-end talent acquisition (job scoping through onboarding) to Cielo, with two ultimate goals in mind: optimize recruitment productivity in a cost-effective manner, and change the reactive approach to one of proactivity by removing recruitment from the HR generalist function and thus freeing up HR to operate as a consultative and strategic component of the organization.

The organization’s dedicated team of recruiters and talent acquisition professionals, now known as “Team STAT” (Smiths Medical Talent Acquisition Team), designed a custom people, process and technology solution then quickly integrated and became an extension of the internal HR team. They attend continuous training programs, make onsite visits regularly to consult with leadership, have established an impactful social recruiting presence, and continue to launch improvement initiatives such as:

• Quarterly and annual business reviews with Smiths Medical senior leadership
• Develop a Hiring Manager Handbook
• Execute text message and email campaigns
• Integrate video interviewing technology
• Establish diversity and inclusion awareness programs

Additionally, the dedicated team has helped Smiths Medical implement a requisition management process, institute hiring manager and candidate satisfaction surveys, as well as conduct regular employee reviews. Not only have these initiatives enhanced employee and candidate experience, but Team STAT’s commitment to transparency and frequent reporting on the status of Key Performance Indicators has made the ROI evident and secured recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) buy-in from leadership at all levels.

BRINGING TRUE CONSULTATION TO THE SMITHS MEDICAL PARTNERSHIP
Being a truly strategic partner requires more than recruiting quality talent. It calls for flexibility, innovative thinking and proactive scalability. Less than two months into the implementation phase of the partnership, Smiths Medical came to Cielo with an additional high-priority project. The organization was in need of rapid niche hiring for highly skilled research and development professionals in global geographies with limited talent pools. Failure to deliver results was not an option, as Smiths Medical faced immediate financial consequences if hiring goals were not met.

Cielo’s scalability and flexibility enabled Smiths Medical to meet all hiring needs within the project’s tight time constraints and without impacting implementation of the contractual partnership. Cielo’s responsiveness to this challenging project laid the groundwork for a trustworthy, proactive and consultative partnership that continues today. The need for phase II of this project arose less than a year later. Based on lessons learned from the first project, proactive scalability had been built into the model and the Smiths Medical dedicated team paved the way for delivery of a seamless project.

SEEING BEYOND FINANCIAL ADVANTAGES
Less than two years into the partnership, hiring manager satisfaction has increased, cost-per-hire has reached an all-time low, and agency spend is significantly less. Financial advantages aside, through continued partnership with Cielo, the Smiths Medical HR team has driven necessary culture change organization-wide, proving that while RPO is cost effective, there truly is no substitute for a strategic partnership.

RESULTS IN BRIEF

• Achieved a 98% candidate satisfaction rating
• Increased hiring manager satisfaction by 36 percentage points in first quarter of partnership
• Significantly increased passive candidate flow
• Reduced interview-to-hire ratio by 20%, ensuring hiring managers spend time with only the best candidates
• Decreased cost-per-hire to well below the industry average
• Decreased average time-to-fill by approximately 50%
• Decreased agency use to less than 10% of hires, decreasing annual agency spend by more than 80% in less than two years