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Saving Simply Business $130,158 on recruitment costs
43
Ruby engineer hires
$130,158
savings vs. agency model
1
extra Talent Partner added
At SB it’s not just about hiring people quickly - we have a big focus on hiring the right people, the talent experience and being known as an amazing place to work. The great (and unique) thing about working with Talentful is that they deliver results whilst also putting emphasis on this at the same time. They hired over 40 tricky roles for us and gave us processes and learning that we needed so that our new joiners felt empowered to do their best work from day one. Their consultants were fantastic brand ambassadors too and a delight to work with.
Simply Business is one of the UK’s largest providers of small business insurance – providing insurance to over 650,000 small businesses and landlords. It offers simplicity, choice and value when it comes to purchasing insurance.
An accredited B Corp for their positive social impact, Simply Business has been voted the Sunday Times “Best Company To Work For” twice.
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The Challenge
Simply Business were looking to scale their engineering hires by 50% in 2019, focusing on notoriously tricky Ruby roles. However, they had no specialist tech talent acquisition function in-house. This meant that, when it came to hiring for specialized roles like Ruby engineers at pace, there was an over-reliance on external agency spend and no established pipeline.
With their ambitious growth plans this put Simply Business in a precarious position; without the processes in place for their own teams to hire for these roles, there was no obvious solution for how they could start to bring their tech hires in-house and reduce costs in the timeline required.
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Reliance on agency hires
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Specialized, senior tech roles needed
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Internal team training required for specialist hires
The Solution
The very first thing that needed to be addressed was to define and establish a slick hiring process for tech hiring. With a proposed Client Lead and two Talent Partners, Talentful were asked to develop the process for both hiring managers and candidates to upskill and partner with Simply Business’ internal Talent teams.
With the disparity of candidate experience between the internal team and their external agency rosters a clear area of concern, Talentful integrated and embedded their team fully with the business. A few days on-site every week enabled the Talentful team to get an inside understanding of where the processes needed improving, and what would be needed to set the hiring managers and the internal recruiters up for long-term success.
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Embedded Client Lead and two Talent Partners
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Trained and upskilled in-house team
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Improved hiring process
The Results
Having crafted a revised hiring strategy and internal processes, the Talentful team were able to:
- Centralize the engineering talent function and implement weekly reporting.
- Provide upskilling and interview training across all of the UK engineering hiring teams.
- Complete an ROI analysis of existing candidate sources and bolster efforts with a new sourcing platform.
- Implement a revised referral program.
- Generate market maps and valuable candidate insight to assess the talent landscape.
- Hire 43 mid to senior level Ruby engineers, saving $130,158 vs. a traditional agency model.
After the early success of the project, Simply Business took advantage of Talentful’s flexible offering to add a third Talent Partner to the account. This enabled the team to focus on the improvement of the diversity and inclusion efforts, whilst also partnering with the in-house tech events hosted by Simply Business and helping with the creation of employer branding videos and content – such as a tech-specific interview pack for prospective candidates.
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Ruby engineer hires
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$130,158 savings vs. agency model
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1 extra Talent Partner added