Sourcing top industry talent for key strategic roles
The ability to source great products at competitive prices is a prime focus for the Global Business Unit (GBU) and Group Food Sourcing (GFS) teams at retail giant Tesco. GBU manages the commercial buying relationship of Tesco’s top 20 global suppliers. GFS is developing a group food sourcing capability that leverages the Tesco scale, brand and expertise to deliver better products at cheaper prices.
While Tesco already had significant in-house resourcing capability, the GBU and GFS management wanted to supplement this activity with an executive search specialist, within proven success within retail. One who could proactively search and identify key professionals within the industry to add value to these two key units. ResourceBank had worked successfully on a similar key project for ASOS and, as a result, were contracted to work alongside the Tesco in-house resourcing capability in a partnership project approach.
The Challenge
The main challenge faced was to source, attract and recruit suitably skilled and experienced individuals from large, well respected FMCG organisations into what is best known as a retail brand. This challenge was compounded by three key factors; the business had been experiencing some high profile, negative publicity in the media; the location where the roles would be based, which was not in the same geographical region as many of the most suitable candidates and lastly; Tesco’s perceived employer brand within the target market.
In addition, the limited knowledge of pay scales within the sector needed to be quickly addressed and the team needed to get up to speed and embedded with the internal recruiters within Tesco so that they could both understand and positively promote the business to prospective candidates.
The Solution
The key deliverable was to source high calibre talent for the business, supporting the in-house team by managing the recruitment for high profile, ‘challenging to recruit for’ vacancies. A dedicated team within ResourceBank Executive (RBE) was put in place to offer day to day management, as well as support from a team of consultants and researchers who identify, hook-in and source talent. This included the flexibility of an onsite presence each week. The team focused on extensive mapping of the marketplace across Commercial, Procurement and Technical functions and rapidly developed a strong understanding of Tesco’s culture, as well as establishing a robust, streamlined process to ensure successful delivery .
The Outcome
An initial project to work on 15 roles in February 2013 grew quickly. As the ResourceBank team demonstrated the capability to source high quality candidates for key roles, the range and number of roles allocated to team expanded to encompass 65 business critical appointments for Tesco, across all areas including Supply Chain, Commercial, Technical and Procurement. The ResourceBank team gained an in depth understanding of the business and the requirements for all new talent acquired and implemented a more robust recruitment process. Sound relationships were developed with senior Tesco stakeholders, resulting in successful recruitment of candidates for a range of key roles within the business. Over the course of the project, the team received positive feedback and introductions to exciting new areas of the Tesco business to support their talent acquisition agenda globally.
