We brought a critical digital capability in-house

The ambition

Bring a critical digital capability in-house.

Connected technology was becoming an increasingly important part of the product experience. For this HealthTech business, the next step was to bring the capability behind it in-house.

That meant creating expertise across mobile and software engineering, product, design and DevOps, bringing together the skills needed to take ownership of its connected products and their continued development.

The challenge

A concentrated hiring requirement needed a different response.

The decision to bring this capability in-house created a concentrated need for specialist hiring across several distinct talent markets.

Before hiring began, the client needed a clearer view of those markets: the availability of different skills, realistic salary expectations and how decisions around homeworking and office-based working would affect the people they could reach.

Approached individually, each role could have become a separate search, attracting the costs of hiring in that way. Together, they represented something different: one capability the business needed to build.

That created an opportunity to think differently about both the hiring response and the economics behind it.

The response

We shaped one hiring programme around the whole requirement.

It was clear that our EXTEND model was the right fit for the hiring challenge. EXTEND brings our specialist hiring capability across a broader hiring programme, allowing the delivery and commercials to be shaped around the requirement as a whole rather than each appointment in isolation.

Using our INFORM service, we gathered the intelligence needed to shape that programme. Extensive salary benchmarking and skills mapping gave our client a realistic view of the talent markets they were entering. We also examined homeworking versus office-based expectations and how those choices would affect the available talent pool.

The evidence reinforced what the client had already experienced first-hand. The people they needed weren’t sitting on job boards waiting to apply. Reaching them required proactive search and an opportunity relevant enough to make established specialists consider moving.

That intelligence shaped how we delivered the hiring. We balanced skills and experience across the team, considered team dynamics, sequenced appointments around what the client needed first and adapted our approach as the programme progressed.

Every search remained specialist, with identification and engagement shaped around its individual talent market.

The hiring remained specialist. The model around it changed.