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Sourcing in the EU

Nathan Mann our consultant managing the role
Posted by Nathan Mann
Published on 15 April 2019

When moving into an emerging market, it’s always useful to have professional advice when it comes to employing the best people for the job, especially when that job is a €120-150 million facility build in Germany. An American-based engineering company looking to diversify into Energy from Waste hired our team at Quanta for the expertise we provided in just this area.

Our client company was restricted in that they could not hire project staff directly. We had worked with this client before, helping to field skilled workers for a previous build in the UK; our expert knowledge of the European market meant that we were quickly hired again to source candidates for their German site: a project manager, technical engineering leads and a senior document manager.

Given that our client was running operations from the US, with no German speaking staff, we were required as much to mediate between Germany and America as we were to source candidates.

As the Energy from Waste market is still in development, with few plants in Europe, there was a limited talent pool to pull from, and it proved hard to source people for the roles required. In an industry as ever-changing as the Energy from Waste sector, where technology is constantly developing, finding the right candidate was a matter of finding German-speaking people with the right transferrable skills to bring to the build.

To ensure high-quality results, we vetted candidates thoroughly beforehand, shortlisting 250 candidates down to 40 for telephone interviews, before inviting the final 8 candidates for a face-to-face interview on site in Germany, which the director also attended. Within 4 weeks, the positions were filled.

Thanks to our success in sourcing candidates for our client’s site in Germany and our knowledge of the industry, we’re now engaged as the primary supplier for when the plant goes into construction phase, in addition to our current work hiring people who will deal with the plans, designs and legal issues in the planning phase of the project.

Our expertise in sourcing candidates for this project has been invaluable in allowing us to demonstrate our versatility as a supplier. Given that our client company had never invested in Energy from Waste before, we’re pleased to have been able to lend our expertise to drive the project forward on time. We supported the client with local candidates, local knowledge and local compliance that they didn’t themselves have - and that knowledge is vital when it comes to sourcing the best candidates, regardless of which country or project they’re needed for.

To find out more about how we can support you, contact the team today.