Excelitas

A former colleague who was the EVP HR joined Excelitas, a leading optronics company in the defence, aerospace, military and medical sectors. They were facing challenges around attracting talent for their niche industry and relied heavily on outside recruitment agencies for help. There was no dedicated internal recruitment team so the company placed most recruitment projects under local HR. I was brought in to turn around the situation and enhance the hiring process.

My first priority was recruiting a Business Development Director for their Optronics business. Working in-house, as part of their HR team, I sourced a number of strong candidates with one ultimately being successful and who was recruited within 3 months. This was the first time a senior role had been sourced and hired in-house and showed the organisation what could be done.

Following that successful hire, senior leaders in the business changed their perception and viewed the hiring process as a positive experience. Building on this success I set about improving longer term candidate attraction by focussing on branding and their employer value proposition on LinkedIn. I created company page content that was more people focussed rather than purely product orientated. The effect was to dramatically increase their company page followers giving them a bigger audience and platform when posting job adverts, show casing new products or attending events. The net gain being an enhanced view and awareness of Excelitas as an employer of choice.

Following on from the company branding work I carried out a series of lunch and learn sessions aimed at inspiring employees to use their own LinkedIn profiles more. The objective was to change their perception of their profile being “me only” to “company ambassador”. After completing several sessions there was a noticeable increase in employees sharing company content, engaging with job posts and reaching out to their own talent networks.

My final focus point was the use of their corporate LinkedIn Recruiter package. They had made a significant investment in the tool but were underutilising its capability. I set up several webinars inviting the whole global HR team to attend and talked them through how to use the tool effectively. The focus was around crafting carefully worded InMail’s, how to use the search function and the difference between passive and active candidate approaching.

After 9 months of introducing the concept of recruiting in-house and maximising their use of LinkedIn, they successfully hired a Talent Acquisition Specialist and carried on where I had left off.

Chemring PLC

Chemring provide advanced technologies to the aerospace, defence and security sectors. The company was looking to better utilize LinkedIn. In particular how Chemring could maximise the use of LinkedIn Recruiter, how employees could help raise the profile of the company through their own profiles and how to create a strong EVP through the company’s LinkedIn company page. I was brought in to provide training to the global HR team on these topics and carried out a series of Microsoft Teams calls for the global HR team. The training I gave was enough to inspire and engage them and set them on the right path to implement what I had showed them.

MedTrade

MedTrade are an SME Medical Device company who develop and manufacture wound care products for the military and the healthcare sector. They needed to make several new key hires to take them to the next level and I was brought in as an external head-hunter to help them. The first hire was for a Business Development Manager for their haemostatic dressing business and required a unique set of skills and background. The second was a Head of Sales for their wound care hospital business and again was a narrow search because of the niche industry. Both positions were successfully hired after mapping the market to find the “needle in the haystack” candidates.