Customized Multi-Year Comprehensive RPO

How we augmented the in-house recruiting team of a multi-billion dollar Federal Systems Integrator to reduce talent acquisition cycle times.

Overview

Our client is a large Systems Integration firm with almost all of its business conducted with the US Federal Government. Initially our client was faced with three intersecting challenges:

Financial pressure to operate recruiting support with minimal waste despite an unpredictable demand cycle driven by contract awards
Extreme talent scarcity in key roles through a combination of high demand skills and high levels of government clearance required to perform the work
A changing Federal contracting climate leading to shorter timelines from contract award to expected delivery, highlighted by the preference for awarding large Multiple Award contracts to several companies, followed by a raft of competitive bid task orders

To help mitigate these challenges, the firm decided to partially outsource recruiting support to focus on passive candidate sourcing to compress time to hire cycles and allow for better proposal and task order support while injecting greater resource scale flexibility. Talent Orchard was selected for the project following an RFP process.

Results

Talent Orchard deployed an expert team of experienced public sector recruiters and established an SLA with options to scale support to demand. We partnered with the client to create a proactive sourcing team managed by the client’s resource, but staffed from Talent Orchard to create multiple talent pools for hard-to-find resources. We also became the “go-to” resources for market intelligence gathering, identification of key incumbent resources on engagements being bid and “bid as key” proposal resource search.

As a direct result of the engagement, the client’s core recruiting function was able to better support major large scale proposals, build pools of pre-qualified talent for key positions, and even utilize candidates that had applied in the past for positions but were now resurrected.

By reducing time-to-accept by 11 days, the partnership generated more revenue than the cost of the support contract within one year, and enabled the firm to successfully bid on projects that otherwise would have been hard to win.

Talent Orchard’s impact included the following examples:

In a three-week spell we submitted 75 Intelligence Analysts with TS/SCI resulting in 19 offers.
In response to a rapid IDIQ Task Order for a critical new award we delivered 84 candidates in just a few weeks leading to 19 offers and 13 hires.
In support of the largest program under management at the client we supported a rapid upgrade to talent on the assignment following a critical contract review and became the “sourcing engine” that contributed to a reduction of open positions on the engagement from over 40 to zero.
Over the period of performance, Talent Orchard hired multiple SMEs in areas including Cyber Security, Federal Health, Intelligence, Defense, Federal Finance and Environmental Protection.
Roles supported included Business Development, Program Directors, Systems Architect, Enterprise Architects, including ERP, as well as many significant hires in challenging locations or with high federal clearances.