The challenges of opening in a new location

Opening a new branch or office is always an exciting time, growth into new markets and the expansion of your operation can be the beginning of new opportunity but it can also be hard to get right. The recruitment of an entire group of the right professionals to staff the new location can often provide unique challenges and is often among the trickiest undertakings an organisation commits to. Finding the right mix of skills in sufficient numbers, across multiple levels, and in a location in which you may not have a real presence, is testing in the most favourable of circumstances, this is where the Page Outsourcing approach can add true value.

At its core, Page Outsourcing is designed to deliver a specific project or minimum required volume of hires. We assume responsibility for the recruitment lifecycle needs of certain key areas of your company. It’s our most agile offering, yet still fully tailored to you and your key business objectives. Short-term and project specific, these projects highlight the depth of talent we can call on to meet your project indicators. 

The end-to-end service, which utilises the resources of the three key PageGroup brands is completely scalable based on requirements, identifies the best available shortlist of talent quickly and to an agreed budget. The benefits are numerous but where you are expanding your operation a few stand out: 

One of the key challenges of staffing and opening in a new location is the ability, or lack thereof, to access skilled professionals local to the new office or branch. Many organisations simply do not have the resource available in-house, nor with local recruitment agencies, to be active in the market in multiple localities. When looking for specific skill sets, on which the success of a restructure relies, search via local agencies or in-house teams can be limiting. These barriers are easily mitigated by the scale and scope of the resources available under the outsourcing method. 

We utilise the wide-scale resources of PageGroup’s three key brands, Page Executive, Michael Page and Page Personnel. You’ll benefit from the knowledge, systems and expertise gained from over four decades in recruitment and 6,000 recruitment consultants globally; whilst only having to communicate with one dedicated resourcing partner. Your Page Outsourcing project leader will ensure you get the best out of our resources, in the most efficient time.

Whether you are relocating, expanding or moving into new markets, local marketing intelligence is key to your business growth. In partnership with leading market-analysts Innovantage, our market mapping service will allow you to analyse local recruitment markets. Through innovative data analytics, we can review the volume of jobs being advertised by city, town or region, ranked by discipline, the average salary being offered by job family and which local organisations are recruiting in which functions. 

As well as being able to source highly skilled and specialised candidates from a nationwide talent pool, Page Outsourcing is capable of providing multiple hires across a range of roles. Opening in a new location is going to require multiple new hires. Even if you have existing staff who are willing to relocate, you will still need to bring in new people across a number of functions, and often more than one in a particular job role. Organisations can experience difficulty in hiring one or two professionals into the roles they need; where there is a need for more hires into similar roles, the talent pool can quickly dry up. The diverse sourcing methodologies we employ are capable of finding as many candidates as required for a particular job role. If you need five, ten or twenty hires into a job role, Page Outsourcing can accommodate.

Another challenge which often arises when moving to a new location is that hires are required at multiple levels. You are most likely going to be hiring at entry level, managerial and senior roles, all at the same time. This can put a heavy burden onto typical recruitment methodologies and risks stretching capacity beyond the breaking point. The result of this is less resource and time spent on each hire, less scrutiny of applications, less engagement with candidates and ultimately less chance of hiring the best people. Without the best people, the new expansion of your business is unlikely to prosper.

One of the single greatest barriers to a cost-effective recruitment process is an inflated time-to-hire. Poorly managed recruitment inevitably increases time-to-hire as interviews drag on and good candidates are snapped up by the competition. This can lead to a lot of wasted time and money, with little to show but vacant job roles. This is an expense in time and money that organisations can ill afford, even less when an investment has already been made into a new location. The Page Outsourcing model puts robust processes in place to mitigate these delays and ultimately secure the best talent in the quickest possible time.

If you would be interested in learning more about a bespoke Page Outsourcing solution, please get in touch for a completely non-obligatory talk with one of our team.

Business Development Director, Page Outsourcing

T: 0114 270 3752

E: dalehampshire@michaelpage.com