Driving down the cost of hiring and improving the talent acquisition process

This Irish commercial bank wanted to reduce costs, streamline and improve its recruitment processes, and raise its employer brand profile.

An RPO solution drawing on Morgan McKinley Talent Solutions’s expertise in financial services met the brief, with more than 200 successful hires over the first year.

With offices in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway, and Belfast and employing more than 1,000 staff, our client provides a wide range of banking services, including current accounts, savings and investments, loans, and credit cards.

The bank approached Morgan McKinley Talent Solutions with the objectives of helping its talent acquisition function deliver a better quality of service to hiring managers, reducing the cost per hire, and implementing a set of processes and business rules that transformed the hiring landscape.

Morgan McKinley Talent Solutions addressed the challenge by designing and deploying a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) solution, comprising an onsite team and an account manager, who together took responsibility for meeting the bank’s hiring needs either directly or by managing second-tier recruitment agencies.

Morgan McKinley Talent Solutions built a talent pool of candidates for our client.

“The recruitment administration process is run much more efficiently now and we have reduced the time to hire."

-Bank's HR Manager.

Weekly activity reports provide their HR team with an overview of progress, while a governance structure around service level agreements ensures that hiring managers are always up to date on processes.

“Hiring managers know, for example, when CVs are going to land on their desks.”.

So far, the RPO arrangement has continued for a year and has covered a broad spectrum of professional disciplines, including customer advisors and relationship managers, financial planners, branch managers, banking operations and administration staff, risk managers and marketers.

The hoped-for cost savings have materialised: the cost of hire was reduced by 17% for direct hires (accounting for 90% of hires) and almost 60% for referrals.

This leading commercial bank is also now getting professionals on board faster than ever, with the average time to hire now at 22 days for high-volume hires, 25 days for mid-level hires, and 30 days for more senior positions.