Agility, responsiveness & multilingual recruitment knowledge to meet urgent deadline

This professional services company had won two new high-profile multinational clients. In order to service these customers, the company urgently needed to recruit multilingual IT and customer service staff. At the same time, it was seeking to set up its own talent acquisition function in Dublin. A tough brief, but Morgan McKinley executed a significant hiring plan over the Christmas and New Year holiday period, leveraging its intimate knowledge of Ireland’s highly competitive multilingual market.

This world-leading professional services company is an American multinational corporation that provides custom information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services. 

The company needed to recruit to a tight deadline with a high volume staffing campaign when it acquired two prestigious new clients. For one of these, the company had a specific requirement to acquire candidates fluent in languages that are typically hard to source, such as Russian and Mexican-Spanish. The company faced this situation without an in-house recruitment team based in Ireland. Not only that, but its requirements were changing on an almost daily basis and confidentiality around the new client wins made it harder to recruit the expected hires proactively.

To deliver its customary high quality of service to its new clients, the business process outsourcing specialist therefore needed support from a partner with expert knowledge of the market and rapid access to suitably qualified talent. 

In November 2015 the company engaged Morgan McKinley, which rapidly mapped the market and immediately identified hundreds of IT, multi-lingual customer service and finance applicants. Given the urgency of the situation and the upcoming holiday period, Morgan McKinley put the necessary processes in place to plan and execute a significant hiring assignment. We implemented a well-managed and streamlined interview process and ensured that all candidates enjoyed an excellent recruitment experience. Morgan McKinley tapped into communities of fluent and native speakers of languages such as Russian, Castilian and Mexican-Spanish, French and German, all of whom are in very high demand in Ireland. Every candidate was offered an intensive interview preparation to maximise the interview-to-hire ratio.

Drawing on our expertise and knowledge of the market, Morgan McKinley was able to supply multilingual candidates who met the stringent quality requirements. For example, we recruited 15 suitably qualified native Russian speakers within the first two weeks of the project (34 have been placed in total at the time of writing). At the same time, Morgan McKinley identified ways to reduce recruitment costs and time to hire. In cases where we knew that the candidate was not just a fluent but a native speaker we dropped the language test, which made considerable savings per applicant and accelerated the hiring process. Where we were screening candidates who are resident overseas, we conducted online language assessments.

The drop out and rejection rate on the project was extremely low and Morgan McKinley cut the average time between opening the position to verbal offer to just three weeks. “Candidates who are in high demand do not like the uncertainty of long wait times. Our alignment with the customer and the efficiency of our candidate management process was therefore highly beneficial to the company’s reputation as an employer,” says the Morgan McKinley Project Manager.