(Interviewee: Anne-Marie McCaughan, APAC Staffing Head, Henkel | Sathiaseelan (Sathia) Margammuthu, SEA Recruitment and Employer Branding Senior Manager, Henkel)
Henkel is a global leader in adhesive technologies, beauty care as well as laundry & home care headquartered in Duesseldorf, Germany. The company holds leading positions with its 3 business units in both industrial and consumer businesses.
Contributing 16% of the company’s total earnings and showing more than 4% growth annually, APAC is a crucial market for Henkel. Anne-Marie MacCaughan (Staffing Head APAC) and Sathiaseelan Margammuthu, short Sathia, (Senior Manager Employer Branding & SEA TA) are responsible for ensuring that the company has the talent it needs to further drive its business growth in the region.
Anne-Marie joined Henkel in 2016 – just when the company decided to undertake a crucial transformation of its hiring and talent acquisition setup.
“It was a big shift. Before that we worked with an off-shore model outsourcing many aspects of our hiring process. Now, we have all our recruitment and employer branding operations in-house which enables us to be more flexible and locally appropriate with our approach.
When I joined I was tasked with building and designing the new recruitment team here in Asia Pacific. It was a huge task. I started out by collecting data and analyzing our recruiting needs. It became obvious that we would need external expertise in addition to highly skilled in-house recruiters to tackle the challenges ahead in the region.
That’s why I created a business case for an RPO solution and invited several agencies to submit proposals. One of them was Boyd & Moore Executive Search (BMES).
All in all, a lot of things came together that made BMES the best partner for us.
I had known Tony (Managing Director & Co-Founder, BMES) from a previous partnership. He had helped me create a highly comprehensive talent map of the Japanese tech market which became a powerful sourcing pool for us back then.
This time I worked mainly with Jonas (Vice President – APAC, BMES) and from the very beginning I felt that he was a good fit especially in regard to managing the relationships with our internal stakeholders. In addition, I knew from my past experience that they had extraordinary sourcing capabilities in India and strong expertise in the region. They also were able to demonstrate previous experience with similar clients. Last but not least BMES presented a very cost-efficient model that aligned well with our expectations. All in all, a lot of things came together that made BMES the best partner for us.”
The project got kicked off in September 2017. Sathia who is working closely with the BMES team explains the onboarding process and current setup.
“BMES provides us with a fully rounded service. Currently we have 1 account manager – Jonas – who takes care of the big picture, 2 onsite recruiters, 2 administrators and several sourcing experts who are supporting our hiring efforts. One of the recruiters is located in Singapore covering the Singaporean and Malaysian markets. The 2nd Consultant is stationed in Thailand covering Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam.
During the first month we spent most of our time on helping the Onsite Consultants build the necessary relationships within the company. I was impressed by how fast Jonas and the Consultants were able to introduce themselves to and establish great rapport with the hiring managers.
BMES’ sourcing capabilities helped us close even difficult roles that had been open for a long time. They do a great job in mapping the market around particular skill requirements as well as building a large network that we can leverage if necessary.
In addition, we have 2 administrators who are working with our in-house talent management system and several sourcing specialists who support the Consultants with identifying and engaging the right candidates. All of these people are located in the Boyd & Moore Intelligence Center (BMIC) in Pune, but they deliver excellent results.”
Speaking of results…
“We are very satisfied with how things are going,” says Sathia. “Thanks to BMES we were able to place over 120 people in South East Asia (SEA) just in the first half of this year.
BMES’ sourcing capabilities helped us close even difficult roles that had been open for a long time. We are sometimes targeting extremely niche or scarce skill sets which we would not be able to reach without a proactive and strategic approach. The BMES team does a great job in mapping the market around particular skill requirements as well as building a large network that we can leverage if necessary.
I am impressed by the dedication of the team. The Consultants are well aware of the expectations we’re having, and they work hard to achieve the KPIs we assigned them.
One of the KPIs is time to offer. Although we’re still not quite where we want to be due to some of the market challenges we’re facing here in the region, we are definitely able to hire quicker than before.
Another KPI is quality of candidates which we measure in terms of how happy our managers are with the results – which they very much are. In addition, Jonas frequently travels to each one of them across the region to make sure that everything’s on track. The hiring managers very much appreciate his commitment and expertise. For them it’s extremely helpful to have an expert that they can consult with and from whom they can receive valuable market information.
Besides that, we have the added benefit of a reduction in our recruitment hiring cost following our improved in-house sourcing capabilities, thanks to BMES”
