Recruiting in Russia

A Talent Pool is defined as a group of people with whom an employer maintains a direct individual relationship for the purpose of future employment. At its simplest form, it means maintaining and managing a fully-fledged candidate community segmented by such things as geography and professional skills.

This type of service is very useful for companies that have a constant need of hires for a specific region or function, or need to hire a large number of candidates for similar roles in a particular moment. Owning and managing a talent pool in these cases is far more cost effective and allows you to stay ahead of the competition and to support anticipated growth.

In this particular project, our client, a consumer goods company with operations in more than 165 countries, active in the category of household and personal care products, was planning to rump up their business in Russia. In order to do so, their main focus was on enlarging and reorganizing their sales structure, for a better presence in the territory and for a more efficient and clear organizational chart.

The positions in their internal structure for which they had a constant need of candidates were those of Regional Sales Manager, Key Account Manager, National Key Account Manager and Sales Director.  

First of all a complete list of companies operating in the same market segment in Russia was built and, analyzing it together with the client, considering their dimension, financial details, influence in the market and other important criteria, a list of 10 most appropriate companies to map has been agreed. Afterwards, we proceeded to the identification and approaching of sales people working in those 10 companies that could be suitable for the four roles to be mapped and reached a number of 254 names. While approaching each one of them for potential career changes, besides data about their professional experience, expertise and future plans, we also sourced information about their current reporting level, number of colleagues, position in the organizational chart, benefits received, career growth opportunities with their current employer and other details that could help us achieve our goals.

The main difficulties in doing so where related to identifying and approaching passive candidates, people that are not actively looking for new job opportunities and are not that visible online, but still have an important role in the evolution and progress of their current employers.

However, due to our expertise in this field and specific methods related to passive candidates recruitment, by the end of the project our client received a complete report on the sales structure, retention policies and benefits offered to sales people coming from their main 10 competitors and benefited also from a large talent pool with prospective candidates to be approached at any time.