Summary of the services delivered to them.

• IT department recruitment from 1^st line support through to IT Director
• Contract project team of 75 contractors to perform a major system migration
• MBA Management development scheme recruitment
• Graduate development scheme recruitment
• Dynamic talent general management recruitment campaigns through the Sunday Times
• Finance recruitment delivering Management Accountants to the IT division

The story – what we delivered, what they experienced.

In common with most Big Red clients the relationship started with a referral from an old contact to the CEO of Liberata who was struggling to recruit the right people for his Graduate and MBA development schemes. We won a project to recruit for these areas which was very successful and marked the start of a very successful relationship that spanned 5 years and survived 3 complete changes in the senior management team (Liberata was a very rapidly changing and aggressive VC backed company!)

We subsequently got involved with running general management “dynamic talent” recruitment campaigns which demanded we use a wide variety of methods to source the candidates. These included – Sunday Times and web based advertising, database search, direct presentations to leading MBA business schools, direct presentations to organisations representing officers leaving the services and some headhunting.

Once we had completed the initial project we had gained such an insight into what Liberata needed that we acted as if we were internal resources being used for ad hoc interviewing and assessment days and one off projects to source people for other senior roles.

We were then introduced to the IT Director and struck a deal to provide a managed service to the whole of the IT division. With significant sites in Milton Keynes, Sheffield, London, Croydon, Newport, Reading, Barrow and latterly Redcar we forged partnerships with a variety of regional and technology recruitment agencies to provide all of the people Liberata required. We managed over 20 different suppliers to supply everything Liberata needed.  The roles were very varied covering everything in the IT department including user support, Server Specialists, Network Specialist, Security Specialists, Disaster recovery, application development, ERP specialists, BA’s, Project and Programme Managers as well as the management team to ensure this growing group hit the targets the business was setting.

One area of Liberata’s business was concerned with migrating major Life and Pensions providers back office systems onto Liberata’s own platform called Amarta. Liberata had significant deals with AXA and Barclays to migrate hundreds of thousands of policies across to the new platform as part of a significant BPO deal. With the migrations running late and severe penalties in place for late delivery the decision was made to supplement the permanent workforce with a team of contractors to delivery the project on time and avoid the penalties.

We were tasked with sourcing a large team of contractors covering the following skills:

• Life and Pension Business Analysts
• Data migration analysts
• Project managers
• Actuarial analysts
• Actuarial consultants
• Informix programmers

Timescales were tight and the impact on the hiring managers time had to be controlled as they couldn’t afford to give up the day job while searching for the 75 contractors they needed.

Big Red’s managed service approach rolled into action, we quickly identified and engaged with the industry specialists in each of the areas and set up weekly on site interview days where we tested and pre-screened the candidates before rolling them through to the hiring managers. We were able to hone the process so that the interview to offer ratio was better than 2:1, the timescales were achieved and most importantly the quality of the candidates we sourced meant that the project was delivered on time avoiding the crippling penalties that were looming.

In total we recruited over 150 permanent staff and over 95 contract staff for Liberata in the 4 years we worked together.

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