Teva’s triumphant trio

17 March 2010

The Challenge
Collaboration is the name of the game for external recruiters working with clients to find the best possible talent. This is even more important when two external recruitment specialists combine to deliver a joint solution - which is the route that pharmaceutical company Teva UK has chosen. Part of the global Teva Pharmaceutical Industries group, Teva supplies medicines to pharmacies and hospitals, from painkillers to antibiotics, and lifesaving injectable medicines to fight cancer. Its specialities are generic medicines (medicines whose patents have expired) and respiratory medicines, especially asthma inhalers. However, it is not just looking for highly qualified people with science degrees. The positions it needs to fill cover many areas including
logistics, finance, packaging technicians, regulatory specialists, and sales & marketing personnel.

HR consultancy Resourcing Matters (RM) had been working with Teva for around seven years on bespoke assessment roles, using knowledge of the culture and behaviours required. The firm designs many of the competency-based candidate assessments and telephone interviews. Director Janet Cowell told Recruiter that Teva also used recruitment agencies alongside the work of RM. Senior HR business partner at Teva UK Helen Bee told Recruiter that the company had built a strong relationship with RM by the time she joined the company at the end of 2006. “Over time, RM became more and more involved in our resourcing needs. We were looking to reduce our agency fees, as well as explore the burgeoning internet market,” said Bee. Teva had tried online advertising on a major job board but had been disappointed with the results. “It was very time-consuming,” said Bee. “We had to sift through scores of irrelevant CVs from candidates who were unsuitable either from the qualification side or from overseas without the entitlement to work in the UK.”

The Solution
Due to the strong relationship between Teva and RM, Cowell saw a possible solution to Teva’s evolving resourcing needs. She explained that she had worked with Lis Wilson, director of online recruitment specialist HR Connexions at a recruitment agency in the past. “I knew that Lis had become a director of a business which haddeveloped its own sophisticated software [HRC Live] to source candidates and knew we could access a wider range of applicants that would be a good fit for Teva,” she said. Wilson and Cowell decided that thecombined offering of generating quality candidates cost-effectively, while providing a professional assessment service, would fulfil Teva’s resourcing brief.

Teva sends its vacancies first to Cowell at RM, who passes on the jobdescriptions to HR Connexions (HRC). Using its online expertise, HRC is able to promote positions on behalf of Teva with a web-friendly, Teva-branded advertisement, making use of around 50 selected online job sites. “We then shortlist the top 10-20%,” explained Wilson. “Although we use an automated system to generate suitable candidates, it still takes a human element to look at a CV and decide on its relevance to the job.” The firm relies on the personal touch before forwarding the shortlist to RM. “Computers can only do so much,” she added. Teva has access to all applicants at any stage through the HRC Live software. “There is a Teva-branded landing page which all applicants are directed to from whichever source. So in most cases the applicants don’t even know that HR Connexions exists and believe that they are applying direct to Teva.”

The complete shortlist is then passed onto Bee’s team at Teva, who then decide which candidates RM should contact with their competency-based telephone interviews. “If the telephone shortlist is 10 candidates, then following RM’s input, we would see three or four good quality candidates,” said Bee. This combined offering has produced significant cost savings for Teva. “Our savings last year were somewhere in the region of £80k where we have cut our agency use,” said Bee.
As Teva uses this partnership more often, with HR Connexions and Resourcing Matters becoming more embedded in its culture, the successes also improve. Cowell said that the three-way relationship is changing over time. “And it’s good that it’s evolving. It shows that communication is ongoing between all three partners to achieve the best results.” And Teva is about to launch a careers website www.tevaukcareers.com to further improve the process for company and candidate alike.

Lessons learned

• Be prepared to move and flex over time. Don’t stop the relationship from evolving as all partners get to know each other’s cultural fit more and more
• A three-way partnership will obviously need time to work out but time investment in the beginning is well worth the outcome
• The more each partner gets to understand each other, the better the candidate fit for the client, so put the effort in to become truly embedded in the client’s work culture

Would you like to be involved in The Challenge? Contact Vanessa Townsend at vanessa.townsend@centaur.co.uk