2004 HRINZ HR Award Winners
Beca
Photography Robert Catto www.catto.co.nz
Background/Introduction
Beca is a 1200-strong professional services consultancy based in New Zealand with offices throughout Australia and South East Asia. Their core skills are engineering design, planning, project management, architecture and valuations. They operate in a number of different market segments including industrial, buildings, transportation, water and waste water, food and beverage, environmental and resource management. As a professional services consultancy the product they bring to the market is the intellectual capital of their people.
Beca has a strong sense of pride relating to their New Zealand heritage and ownership and believe that maintaining and even accentuating, their Kiwi origins and ownership is both a strength and key differentiator for them now and in the future.
Beca’s HR Initiative is based on a multi faceted recruitment campaign.
The problem
Skill shortages within the technical professions continue to escalate and, as the New Zealand labour market contracts, Beca faces stiff competition not only at home, but also in their primary offshore recruitment markets as organisations transcend geographic boundaries in their search for human resource.
Objective
Attracting and retaining people is foremost on the agenda of most businesses today and, in the context of recruitment, this means developing new strategies for attracting candidates to meet the immediate needs of the business.
In terms of the HR function, this has meant rising to the challenge of shifting years of traditional ways of thinking which are deeply embedded in the organisation with respect to prioritisation, effort, budgets and the philosophical approach to recruitment.
While the focus of their paper was on the implementation and development of strategies around attracting people to our organisation, it is important to note that the overarching goal for Beca’s HR team is to help build organisational capability. Beca’s 2004/05 business plan, agreed in consultation with the Chief Executive Officer, focuses on people attraction and retention via five key initiatives, all of which have a level of interdependency.
The first of these was development and implementation of a cohesive companywide recruitment strategy.
Beca has developed and implemented a simple and sustainable initiative that has had high impact throughout the business. Whilst not a unique circumstance or topic for the HR practitioner in a professional services organisation, it has presented a set of challenges for which the solutions needed to be unique to their organisation.
Implementation /Development
Beca’s attraction strategy focuses on fundamental objectives:
Attracting high calibre candidates (i.e. focusing on quality, not quantity and volume);
Increasing the acceptance rate of offers made (i.e. Beca needed to make sure that the people they want to employ will want to work for Beca);
Raising the Beca profile and attracting candidates from offshore.
Results/Success
The success of this initiative is evident in the increased number of placements made in the 2004 year compared to previous year. The time it takes to fill a vacancy impacts directly on Beca’s bottom line. The longer a position remains unfilled, the more billable hours and therefore, revenue, is lost by the organisation.
It is also interesting to note that Beca has now had 13 of their alumni return from overseas and continue working with them.
Conclusion
Initiatives such as the Recruitment Referral Scheme and Scope have enhanced the connection between the business and it’s people, engaging the whole organisation in the recruitment process and promoting career progression.
The development of Beca’s recruitment strategy has relied heavily on collaboration and sharing of knowledge between the HR team and other parts of the business. Much of Beca’s success can be attributed to the enhancements that our Marketing and Business Technology teams have contributed. These are compelling examples of HR partnering within the organisation to achieve business objectives and to establish the platform for ongoing collaboration and success.
