RPO to deliver specialist talent for biotech company's new manufacturing centre

With growth plans for their manufacturing centre in South-East Ireland, the client needed highly skilled talent to join and further build out the capability of their state-of-the-art Drug Product plant.

They faced one issue; their Talent Acquisition team was based in Dublin and they had no TA on-site in South-East Ireland making it difficult to hire talent for the new roles.

In hope of taking the headache away from their TA team, they called upon the experts…

The client is a global biotech company, specialising in autoimmune diseases. They blend science with compassion and focus on the best possible treatments for patients, rather than solely focusing on the disease.

They were committed to building a robust manufacturing operation in South-East Ireland during the next several years after purchasing and taking over another facility. In order to accommodate this, significant employee growth is required.

With only 50 people on-site at their Drug Product plant, they were looking to double their headcount to begin with, before exploring further expansion.

Due to the nature of the work, the roles were requested to be on-site 5 days per week, which poses its own challenges in today’s working world. Add to that the location of the plant being outside of Ireland’s ‘typical’ employment zones, as well as a lack of brand awareness, and we knew that a sizeable effort would have to be put behind attracting candidates for the opportunities.

Being an American Multinational company, any activity around benchmarking and approval for roles could be very time consuming, so we set about making that as easy as possible for our contact at the client.

Recognising the scale of the requirements, and the niche roles that needed to be filled, we deployed a team of four, with one member working on-site.

After early delivery success, the client was eager to scale up so we increased our team to five - a Programme Manager, Team Lead and three recruiters - with each on-site.

From engineering, process validation, and automation engineers, to quality roles, analysts, finance and HR, across permanent, FTC, contractors and maternity cover, their requirements were varied and vast.

With a limited talent pool in the local area, we created a pack that outlined the benefits of living and working in the region in order to better promote the opportunities to tempt those from other regions within the country, as well as from Europe. Alongside this, we helped their hiring efforts by building a bespoke landing page which housed all live roles and further promoted their brand.

All candidates were directly sourced, using a blend of the client's own ATS, the extensive Morgan McKinley database and LinkedIn searches.

Throughout 2022 we hired 50 new employees into their Drug Product plant, and in the first quarter of 2023 we filled a further 11 niche roles - much to the pleasant surprise of their Global Head of HR. These new growth hires were all alongside numerous replacement hires.

For the duration of the programme, we held regular meetings with the client to ensure transparency and keep them updated with progress.

The programme was deemed a great success, with some of the key highlight benefits being:

• 70+ new staff members hired into highly specialised positions helping them move towards achieving their growth goals.
• 0% attrition from hires creating a stable workforce.
• 98% success rate of candidates put forward.
• Time-to-hire was on average 44 days, compared to the industry average of 3-4 months.
• Headache taken away from Dublin based internal TA function.
• Raised the awareness of the client's brand as very few people knew they had a presence in South-East Ireland.