The challenge
In March 2020, during the early stages of the Covid-19 outbreak, Reed Talent Solutions were engaged as the government’s lead partner in managing the assessment, engagement and onboarding of very large volumes of skilled laboratory professionals.
Due to the urgent nature of the request, we had a very short timescale in which to provide critical test analysis services to process Covid-19 swab samples.
As part of the national effort to bring the global pandemic under control, we were briefed to find data scientists, lab assistants, lab technicians, lab shift managers, sample handlers and senior lab technicians during the first wave of cases.
After the first wave, this expanded to include 12 other job titles, including section supervisors, testing supervisors, biomedical scientists, RNA extraction scientists, team leaders, PCR scientists and training managers.
The solution
Reed Talent Solutions implemented a bespoke recruitment solution in March 2020 and, due to the successful delivery of the service, continue to provide this to the client on an ongoing basis.
Within the first two weeks, we had:
Appointed a dedicated resource team of 11, including a team leader and 10 talent resourcers, giving both the client and applicants direct access to full support throughout the recruitment journey.
Designed and deployed a client-specific landing page to direct all applications through one central point, allowing us to promote through social media, direct mail shots and other attraction methods.
Built a stand-alone process for the client through our bespoke in-house CRM to ensure all applicants received an excellent and streamlined experience. This enabled real-time access to data on applicants in each stage of the process. Potential candidates were also able to view progress via the system, therefore reducing queries.
Assigned an expert account management team to provide governance and strategic support - ensuring that target timescales and volumes were met.
The results
Within the first week of the campaign, we engaged and processed over 1,000 applications, deploying over 300 workers.
The campaign and recruitment process were so successful that we were able to build a talent pool of over 1,700 pre-screened and assessed professionals with DNA and PCR experience across the specialist staffing groups. This enabled us to provide continuous supply to these roles, ensuring that our client can consistently provide their targeted swab services without a drop in resource.
We were subsequently awarded additional projects to expand our service to cover a wider base of laboratories to support the government in accelerating additional resource for testing. Our client is still in a period of accelerated growth; this has required an enormous collective effort to scale up fast and supply a large workforce of lab technicians, biomedical scientists, genetic technologists and molecular biologists.
Furthermore, we have the expertise and market-leading technology to quickly deploy this recruitment model to a broad range of role types, skills and markets to quickly attract, sift and select candidates and build talent pools for ongoing demand.
To date we have placed 745 candidates across seven locations and 13 different job titles and have a talent pool of 1,700+ pre-screened and assessed professionals ready to deploy.
