“In the end we chose Ochre House as our EMEA recruiting process outsourcing partner because of its performance throughout our selection procedure and its broad reach and experience servicing large customers across the region,.” says Agilent’s Europe staffing manager, Nury Plumley. “The standout moment during our selection process was our recruitment Challenge where the three finalists were asked to produce a shortlist for one of our more difficult to fill openings in just three days. Ochre House outperformed their competitors both in terms of approach and Results.”

Ochre House and Pinstripe now work side by side, sharing a common talent pool, strategy and a standard global applicant tracking system supplied by the business solutions company, ADP VirtualEdge. “Both organisations handle the whole of the sourcing process,” says Plumley, “from identifying and attracting potential hires right through to the onboarding of new employees. Agilent’s next step will be to find a supplier to handle the third key piece of the jigsaw – the Asia-Pacific region.

Over the past few years we’ve been talking to more and more businesses that want truly international responses to their staffing Challenges. However the most insightful of these, organisations like Agilent, have come to the conclusion that a single, templated approach will not work effectively. Instead they are choosing a partnership of local regional specialists as the optimal solution.

There’s been a lot of talk about global markets brought about by the effect of globalisation and the communications revolution that the internet brought but that’s not the same as there being one single global market. In EMEA, for example, what works in France, Germany and Spain in terms of physical and online networking won’t necessarily work in somewhere like Russia where people respond best to specific well thought-out approaches. And further afield in a major growth market such as China there are lots of potential problems in terms of using the web for recruitment because many of the online tools we employ in Europe and the US wouldn’t make it through the country’s firewalls.

At least for the foreseeable future, therefore, in-depth local knowledge combined with international reach is likely to provide vital competitor advantage in the battle for the best people. The Challenge is to turn this regional partner model into a global solution for the client. We’re aiming to tackle this by ensuring we combine flexibility in individual geographical markets with a common, consistent approach to the things that can realistically be regarded as ‘universal’ – criteria that are non-negotiable wherever hiring is undertaken.

In this category would be such things as buy-in to the company’s business and social philosophy, its basic standards and its commitment to diversity and work/life balance. In our view this combination of local and international is not a stop-gap or a compromise while we wait for some completely global hiring platform to be devised. The most effective solution talent sourcing model has already arrived.