The Situation

The Client was faced with many uncertainties typical to a startup business. As they began ramping up their production line, they sought a talent acquisition partner to help balance their resource requirements to meet production timeframes and changing customer demands. After much consideration and a review of all vendor capabilities, the Client determined that contingent labor could best meet their production needs and selected Acara to support a Master Vendor Program (MVP).

The Challenge

To successfully attract 50 to 80 production associate candidates, Acara provided a dedicated team of five recruiters focused on identifying and attracting talent while overcoming the following challenges:

• Located in a remote northeast location with long commute times, the Client was experiencing difficulty identifying and attracting qualified candidates interested in making a lateral move within their current organization and joining a startup as a contractor. Once a qualified candidate was identified, the Client had to act quickly to ensure he/she was not lost to a competitor.
• Struggling to predict the number of resources needed, the Client was working to improve it’s workforce forecasting.
• The Client’s pay rates were not competitive with the local market and hindered the success of talent attraction efforts.

The Solution

To be successful, the Acara recruiting and marketing team would need to work collaboratively with the Client’s talent acquisition (TA) team to understand their corporate culture and value proposition. After gaining an intimate understanding of the Client’s pain points, we knew that the MVP was the right solution.

Acara’s solution included:

• Holding weekly calls with the Client’s TA team and VP of Operations to ensure we were meeting their changing needs.
• Increasing the Client’s visibility in the local market. Acara’s team of internal marketing specialists conducted a digital marketing campaign to target prospective job candidates that included geofencing—using location-based technology—print ads with QR codes resulting in two immediate hires, digital ads in the local newspaper, and a targeted email campaign. In addition, Acara conducted onsite job fairs and hiring events at local colleges.
• Providing weekly reports with actionable information such as submittals, interview-to-hire details, decline reasons, competitor pay rates offered to candidates, etc.
• Presenting compensation analysis reports to the Client to validate that their pay rates were not competitive relative to market standards and demonstrate the benefit of implementing a shift differential. Once market rates were increased, candidate attraction improved.

The Conclusion

The Client understood and committed to doing what it took to win talent in the market—including providing same-day feedback on candidate resumes and a willingness to train workers for the production associate role. Additionally, the Client allowed candidates to begin work immediately after completing their onboarding paperwork, pending drug and background screening results. These strategies shortened the time required for a candidate to start working and significantly improved the number of candidates that reported to work the first day versus accepting a job offer from a competitor.

By trusting the Acara recruiters’ expertise to make same-day job offers to qualified contingent workers, the Client’s internal TA team could focus on direct hires.

Since the onset of the MVP, we have been committed to forging a successful partnership with the Client—centered on the values of trust and transparency. Thanks to our rapid response times and commitment to talent acquisition excellence, our recruiting team achieved the following results, which showcase our strength in discovering candidates that aligned with the Client’s needs:

• 91% interview-to-hire ratio
• 117 offers extended
• 72 contingent hires made in four months
• 40 payroll hires were onboarded by Acara in the first 90 days
• $720,111.00+ in total billing