Situation
BASF set up its Engineering & Maintenance Asia Pacific Department in Shanghai, China, in early 2011 with plans to hire 100 engineers every year based on business growth.
BASF engaged Hudson RPO’s engineering recruitment services in May 2012. Because multiple third-party engineering recruitment agencies had been running the hiring efforts and were competing in the market for the same talent pool, candidates were being approached multiple times about the same BASF engineering jobs with differing messages from agency recruiters. This had negative impact on BASF’s employer brand in the Chinese market. BASF also had little visibility into the candidate marketplace for niche positions and also lacked a clear framework for attracting and engaging talent in marketplace in general.
Journey to success
Hudson RPO deployed a dedicated engineer recruiter team consisting of onsite consultant and offsite sourcing experts to manage the entire recruitment and selection process; from sourcing to onboarding, including vendor management.
They reduced third party agency usage from 8 to 4 based on agency performance. They allocated positions to the third party agencies based on each agency’s strengths to avoid potential overlapping.
Additionally Hudson RPO launched a dedicated and focused mapping process of the talent market and collected market information to help BASF stakeholders better understand the China talent market as well as competitor movements to be more proactive in talent pipelining.
Behind the scenes
Since implementation in late May, 2012 and ramp up till March, 2013, Hudson RPO has filled 58 highly niched vacancies which include 27 placements in Q1, 2013.
Other achievements include:
- Built a talent pool with over 1,400 screened candidates
- Increased employee referrals as well as direct to market hires (total 81% combined)
- Shared timely market intelligence to adjust sourcing direction based on industry movement
- Promoted consistent BASF employer brand messaging to the talent market
- Extended talent pool reach into Southeast Asia through collaboration with Hudson RPO team across different markets
About the client
BASF SE is a German chemical company and the largest chemical producer in the world. The BASF Group comprises subsidiaries and joint ventures in more than 80 countries and operates six integrated production sites and 390 other production sites in Europe, Asia, Australia, the Americas and Africa. BASF has customers in over 190 countries and supplies products to a wide variety of industries.
