Presenting the Companies' Best Face to Potential Employees

Understanding each other’s motivations is key for successful business collaborations. To find the right person for a job, Andrés Sánchez, Managing Director of Randstad, thinks a company must also understand its own vision and how best to present itself to potential candidates.

The Dutch talent management leader Randstad has helped many companies in the European market build their own employer branding to find the best talent for their needs, moving later to Asia and the US. Its next challenge is to conquer the Latin American market and according to Sánchez, Mexico and the automotive industry will play a crucial role in this strategy. This sector represents 5 percent of the company’s global revenue totaling over US$1 billion. It also was one of the main drivers for Randstad’s investment in Mexico. The company now has several Tier 1 clients and about 25 percent of the companies Randstad has in the pipeline belong to the automotive sector. Sánchez is confident that by 2020, the automotive industry will become one of the company’s main business verticals in the country.

Its investment in learning about the industry is one reason Sánchez is so confident about Randstad’s potential in the country. He says the company sources its own talent from within the automotive industry and trains its sales people on the latest trends of each of its business verticals. “Our strategy is not to grow aggressively but to know how best we can support our clients according to their operations and needs, based on our industry knowledge,” he says. Sánchez agrees with Minister of Economy Ildefonso Guajardo and other government officials that there is more than enough talent available in Mexico. With over 100,000 engineers graduating per year, the challenge for the automotive industry is not volume but the lack of skills and level of specialization these people have. To help its clients find the needle in the haystack, Randstad has developed its True Fit methodology that analyzes the candidate’s affinity with a potential employer from three different perspectives: Job Fit, Company Fit and Boss Fit. Randstad can offer its clients a complete analysis on the number of people who can meet the company’s requirements, where they are located and the salary level they are looking for.

When companies demand large numbers of people with a high level of specialization, Randstad’s Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) solution can give the extra edge clients need. The company designates a team of several people to work in its client’s offices to recruit large numbers of highly specialized talent. “This solution has been very attractive in Latin America and we think it will be one of our main sources of revenue in Mexico, supported by our Permanent Placement and Staffing services,” says Sánchez. The latter is Randstad’s flagship solution with over 600,000 employees managed globally and 4,000 in Mexico alone.

Although Randstad can help companies go a long way in their talent attraction process, Sánchez acknowledges that recruitment is a complicated endeavor. The automotive sector is growing and many companies are arriving to the country. This creates a battlefield in labor attraction activities as small suppliers and service companies must compete for the best talent with large and renowned multinationals such as Audi and Kia. Because of this, the executive stresses the importance of companies generating a positive employer branding to attract more and better applicants. “Creating awareness among potential applicants is particularly important in blue-collar industries such as automotive, because people tend to leave their current employers for the slightest improvement in monetary benefits,” he says.

Location is key when establishing employer branding, according to Sánchez. New companies have to be careful when choosing where to build their facilities to ensure maximum talent attraction. Although they might compete with more popular companies at a national or regional level, they will succeed if they are the best-known corporation in a small locality. Another important factor is word-of- mouth and how employees perceive the company. Many corporations are now looking for employer certifications such as the Great Place to Work award. “Having close contact with workers and learning how to improve their relationship with the company is crucial to creating employer branding and ensuring proper talent attraction,” Sánchez says.