About the client
A publicly listed life sciences business with a global technology function. The team behind this role supports IT for IT, effectively the internal platform that every other application in the business runs on, closer to DevOps and site reliability than to a typical IT team. It’s a hundred and eighty people, most of them in Ireland and the rest spread across Europe.
The challenge
The client’s internal talent acquisition team, working internationally rather than locally, had been running the search for over six months and had no trouble generating interest, with strong candidates coming forward from across Europe. Every one of those candidates needed to relocate to Dublin though, and that caught up with the search at offer stage, when the candidate they’d chosen weighed the move and pulled out.
The brief itself pulled in two directions as well. The business runs on documentation as a genuine cultural expectation rather than a nice-to-have, so the person needed real rigour there, and they also had to hold their own with medical and PhD-level stakeholders internally, which asks for charisma as much as process.
How it played out
The internal talent acquisition team’s former manager recommended us, and the team then engaged us directly to bring local reach in Dublin alongside the European search they already had running. We worked with talent acquisition throughout the process rather than around them, since they understood what the search needed and wanted a partner who could go and find it.
We delivered a shortlist within two weeks, including a candidate we’d met at an AWS conference in Kilkenny, introduced by a mutual contact over lunch, months before this brief existed. Five interview stages followed, with a good deal of international travel to coordinate, which turned out to be the part of the process that took the most time. The candidate from that original shortlist was offered the role and accepted around eight weeks after we were engaged.
The candidate
What made this work
A European search was already running well on its own. What it needed alongside it was real depth in one city, and the talent acquisition team recognised that and went and added it rather than trying to stretch the existing search further.
We stayed engaged with the internal team throughout rather than working at a distance from them, and the shortlist was built directly against what they already knew about the role from their own six months on the search.
The successful candidate was in our network long before the brief existed, having met us at a conference, and that only happens when you put the shoe leather in on the ground.