Their story

Hitachi Rail are investing in new digital and data capabilities; embedding these across their organisation, and striving for pioneer status.

Talent has played a pivotal role in Hitachi Rail’s projects by providing industry-leading recruitment services and resources. Our collaboration began with the recruitment of over 100 contractors and 100 permanent employees for Hitachi.

Their story

In late 2006, BHP engaged Talent to improve their hiring activities. We’ve been a vital partner in many of BHP’s high-profile projects, providing approximately 165 contract staff, covering a wide range of mining professionals.

 They wanted to find a partner who could:

• Help improve recruitment outcomes
• Focus on gender equity and workforce diversity
• Provide market insights and be a trusted advisor
• Improve contractor wellbeing

Their needs

SRA supplies software project services and personnel to the Northern Territory Government.  The pool in the Northern Territory isn’t large when it comes to ICT specialists, so location has always been one of the biggest challenges.

Extensive, time-consuming searches for candidates in other States willing to relocate, often with rare skillsets, has been the challenge as remote working has not been an option.

With fixed submission deadlines and tight lead-in times from application to offer, it can be tough to achieve success in filling roles like this.

How we helped Presence save time and win more projects…

Consultative partner.

Presence has quickly become one of our best friends – we talk to them around 3-4 times per week to advise, support and consult them on management decisions with contract staff. 

We have helped them structure T’s & C’s and billing processes with new clients, been a listening ear during challenging times, provided reassurance on all things talent-related and supported with process design.

Interview support.

Fundamental to the success of Presence is their quality-driven, collaborative team who work together to deliver the best possible solution for their clients. We needed to ensure that every candidate shortlisted would be aligned with Presence’s ethos. 

We encouraged candidates to talk candidly about the challenges they faced, the types of projects they enjoyed working on, the things they didn’t like so much about their job, what their learning and development needs were, how they collaborated with others and anything else that would help us determine whether they would be the right fit. 

Bid confidence.

Presence is one of our clients who rely heavily on new talent to deliver high-profile projects for their customers. They are a growing company with a strong reputation to maintain and need to be certain they will have the right people, at the right time – without fail. 

Because of our history of attracting great talent to Presence, they came to trust our ability to quickly mobilise teams which gave them the confidence to bid for new projects. One of these required us to build a team of 14 engineers. This campaign became our highest priority. We took a whole team approach and had a shortlist sent over within 48 hours of briefing.

Finding the talent.

To help Presence identify and attract a diverse selection of candidates, we needed to ensure our approach to talent attraction was broad and inclusive. Presence asked us to hire for strategic permanent and contract roles, with skills across multiple tech stacks and specialisms needed.

With a major initiative to build a truly diverse workforce, Presence needed us to use our knowledge and network to create candidate attraction initiatives that were fully inclusive and would result in a broad, unbiased shortlist.

We used all the tools in our kit to ensure no stone is left unturned. This included:

• Local and national talent community building, networking and referrals
• Market mapping and strategic headhunting
• Targeted advertising campaigns
• Community partnerships that support DE&I initiatives
• Social media engagement
• Database search
• Blogs/individual content engagement
• Events & meetups attendance

Improving the candidate experience increases hires…

Maintaining candidate engagement in a fast-paced market is challenging enough – good candidates know their value and often won’t do coding challenges. Presence was losing out simply because candidates felt disengaged with the two-hour coding assessment they had to complete – other companies were snapping the talent up quickly. 

We helped them re-design the process to include a screen share live code review within the 2nd stage interview which helped them stay engaged with the candidates and gave candidates the opportunity to discuss their strengths and training needs with their future employer.