Holcim: Total Workforce Solution for Building & Construction Recruitment

Holcim is one of Australia’s largest integrated suppliers and manufacturers of building materials and solutions. Their partnership with PeopleScout started with a national recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) solution, through which we recruited personnel across their entire organization including corporate, technical and blue-collar roles in metropolitan, regional and remote locations.

Situation

Following this success, Holcim came to PeopleScout for a project talent solution to support building a team to staff a major infrastructure project for the Western Australian Government. The key location was Metropolitan Perth, which presented challenges for the recruitment team:

1. Australia was experiencing a worker and critical skills shortage following the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, reduced migration and an ageing population. This was making recruiting in the building and construction industry particularly hard.
2. In addition to the national labor shortage, Perth is the main hub for the WA mining sector and the FIFO workforce, which means Holcim was competing with the top mining companies for talent. Given that FIFO wages significantly outstrip metro-based roles, our team had their work cut out for them to attract the talent Holcim required.

Holcim needed to source 20 permanent roles across white-collar, engineering, workplace safety and supervisory roles. In addition to the permanent roles on offer, our team was tasked with sourcing a contingent workforce of 35 blue-collar roles including welders, production operators and machine operators.

Strategy

First, PeopleScout made the strategic decision to approach this like a true project recruitment activity. We dedicated a full-time resource to focus on the project with our project manager working towards specific timelines and taking an agile approach to sourcing and strategy. Our project leader and Holcim stakeholders met weekly to review and re-evaluate how the project was tracking and where modifications needed to be made to meet project requirements.

Holcim’s requirements fluctuated, and at times our team was required to quickly speed up or slow down the recruitment activity due to the dynamic nature of the infrastructure build. To increase our agility, PeopleScout invested in a significant amount of planning when tackling the Perth labor market and assessing the best sourcing strategies to use.

Solution

Our flexible sourcing approach targeted both passive and active candidates. We ran a campaign incorporating traditional recruitment advertising, internal referral programs and strategic sourcing for passive talent via LinkedIn and Seek databases.

A collaboration with a government-funded vocational training and placement program was instrumental in helping Holcim to fill the contingent blue-collar roles and meant that we did not have to compete with the mining sector to source this talent. PeopleScout team managed the relationship with the placement program and completed all vetting activities before the hiring manager interview, leading to faster fulfilment rates and reduced the burden on the Holcim hiring managers.

Results

With the help of PeopleScout’s total workforce solution, Holcim has been able to meet timelines for infrastructure project, and from a recruitment perspective, we are ahead of schedule and under budget.