Case Study - Indigo

Overview

Indigo is a well-known Canadian retailer (TSE:IDG) and eCommerce company owned by Heather Reisman, one of the most influential female business leaders in Canada.  Indigo had long been established as a highly respected Canadian retailer but they were looking to further build upon their eCommerce and digital capabilities as well as leverage data and build out the technical infrastructure to enter the US market.  In order to deliver on these mandates they decided to build a division called “Indigo Digital Innovation”. They were looking to build out a team of 47 people in the span of 6 months across Design, Development, QA, DevOps, Product Management, Mobile, and eCommerce as well as the management layers for that organization.

The VP of Digital Innovation was someone that we have had a phenomenal relationship with over the years and have worked with him for well over a decade across multiple organizations including Yahoo!, Mercatus, Sysomos, Indigo and Setter.  He has put a lot of trust in us over the years, and this was certainly no exception…

Solution

Indigo opted for an On-Demand + Contingency hybrid model.  On these models we play the role of an internal talent acquisition specialist as well as engage the entire team across Canada, the US and Mexico to help to deliver on the project.  This is typically the model that makes the most sense on these larger-scale projects and delivers savings over the cost of hiring an internal resource and using agency partners to supplement when needed.

We worked closely with the key stakeholders and the executive team to help build out a hiring plan and heatmap and rank the planned hires as High, Medium, and Low difficulty. From there we planned and budgeted for what hires could likely be done organically and which would likely need external help.  We then modelled out a few different scenarios and project engagement models options.

We had one of our team members embedded in their team with an email address, ATS access and physically in the office 2 days per week who developed the sourcing strategy, managed all inbound activity (postings, referrals, events, etc.), created job descriptions, worked with the team to iterate and optimize processes, conducted phone and in-person interviews, scheduled and managed the entire process, negotiated and prepared offers.

The projected cost per hire in this model was just over $8,700 per hire, and the end result was the cost per hire wound up about 10% below this.

Results

We were able to successfully deliver on all 47 hires in a span of just over 6 months.

The projected cost per hire was just over $8,700 and the final cost per hire came in at just under $8,000.

Indigo saved over $250,000 in comparison to if 50% of those hires had been done via contingency search (their projected number).

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