Dirk Lonnemann, Founder and CEO While watching a triathlon, a spectator can never truly predict the winner of the race. The fastest looking athlete might not be the first to reach the finish line. Spectators always find it safe to place their bets on athletes who strategise while maintaining endurance throughout the three sequential races. One can’t help but draw a resemblance between the way spectators gauge a potential winner and the role of an HR manager—during a recruitment drive—in selecting their champion candidates. Similar to a triathlon, it is extremely challenging to identify the right candidate that can prove to be a valuable resource for the enterprise. This is where HR managers seek help from recruitment process outsourcing providers that take charge of monitoring the candidates and choosing the champions.
As a veteran in the HR industry and an Ironman Triathlon athlete himself, Dirk Lonnemann understands that an enterprise needs to monitor and measure the performance of the recruitment process to make a surefire choice. To assist enterprises with a seamless recruitment process for acquiring talented professionals, Lonnemann founded FEL. The company acts as an HR partner for enterprises to hire suitable candidates using the best strategies for effective and sustainable recruitment activities. “Our goal is to gather multiple applicants for our clients and help them select the best candidates,” says Lonnemann, CEO of FEL.
The ‘Divide and Conquer’ Methodology
According to Lonnemann, the talent recruitment landscape is witnessing a colossal amount of competition where not only the employees but also the employers are struggling to cross the finish line as an ‘entity of choice.’ These trends have spurred organisations to ‘reconsider’ their recruitment practice as a whole. FEL aims to address these gaps in the talent hiring realm through a unique intelligent recruitment process outsourcing (iRPO) approach. The “i” in iRPO represents FEL’s comprehensive consultation that they bring to the table to help clients redefine the entire recruiting process.
"Our job is to identify the most promising recruitment activities for each vacancy and balance the overall hiring costs in the long run"
To further highlight the company’s prowess, Lennard Scheffler, the Chief Digital Officer of FEL, says, “We differentiate ourselves from the other players in the market with our principle methodology—divide and conquer.” At FEL, the recruiting experts believe in prioritising every step of recruitment equally, and hence, they decentralise the entire process into smaller parts, which are then assigned and managed via different teams.
Following this methodology, FEL’s iRPO services portfolio includes project management, job marketing, active sourcing, application management, selection and reporting.
We differentiate ourselves from the other players in the market with our principle methodology— divide and conquer
The company also deals with talent multi-sourcing like posting recruitment ads on multiple job sites that are dense with SEO keywords. For each project, the project manager discusses the profile with the client in order to understand the requirements and steer the recruiting process. The “recruiting check” is a rather global consulting approach where an FEL consultant takes a close look to the recruiting processes of an enterprise/potential customer.
In general, the recruiting check is the onboarding of a new customer in order to define the baseline of recruiting methods and long term strategies. Based on the responses and client needs, FEL suggests a mix of methods to the client to acquire the required candidates at a low cost and quickly.
iRPO offers comprehensive project management services by thoroughly analysing employer brand and determining their requirements. The company then selects the best method to recruit candidates and creates a seamless flow of demands between recruiters and candidates. iRPO’s online marketing aspect takes care of job advertisements right from drafting the ad to text and image optimisation to defining suitable application methods. Clients can see all the analytics running behind each channel and monitor the channels with statistics. FEL also enables clients to easily manage relevant channels and intervene when required.
"An RPO partner will be just as much a standard for HR departments as a commissioned carrier is for logistics departments today"
In case a passive method like online marketing does not lead to sufficient candidate numbers, FEL enhances the recruitment efforts by active sourcing techniques to reach out to candidates searching for new jobs. FEL also uses HR–partner networks to target the additional needs of clients with companies that are experts in their specific fields. “Our job is to identify the most promising recruitment activities for each vacancy and balance the overall hiring costs in the long run,” says Lonnemann.
With active sourcing, iRPO helps clients develop a catalogue of search criteria and identifies suitable candidates from various channels. Active sourcing is a small piece in the overall efforts taken to hire candidates for vacancies of clients or as Scheffler says, if the recruitment team is a symphony orchestra, then active sourcing is the violin part of it. By conducting detailed research, FEL determines if a candidate is a right fit before approaching them. All of this can be constantly monitored by clients. “We deliver insights to customers; we act with maximum transparency at every step of our process and report back to continuously improve their recruitment activities,” adds Scheffler.
In fact, FEL can provide an application management system or work with an existing one to notify decision-makers about incoming applications. Being completely GDPR compliant, the application management process provides intermediate replies to candidates in cases of selection as well as refusal.
Continuous Improvement and Endurance
What’s more, each of these activities is carried out by specialised departments. For example, online marketing, active sourcing, and handling candidates are individual departments that only deal with their respective divisions and specific challenges. The managers continuously monitor the market for new technologies and coach the entire team on how to use those to stay up to date. “Any department head is a scientist in their field with their own laboratory. They continuously improve the services offered to our customers by implementing new technologies,” says Lonnemann. At the same time, the company aims to systematically lower a client’s workload and fulfil their needs. This way, clients can focus on other essential aspects of HR such as assessment, selection, or employee development. Coupled with that, the company heavily focuses on active sourcing to keep its clients saturated with promising candidates even before the need for filling a job position arises.
"Recognizing the needs of the clients and developing solutions is the fundament for every successful project"
Over the past few years, this methodology has enriched the knowledge base of FEL’s clients and helped them discover the most fitting job-aspirants. For instance, FEL performed its due diligence on an IT company to help them recruit specialised IT staffs. They analysed the job roles and requirements of the client closely and went ahead to use a complete set of recruitment techniques. With FEL by their side, the client was able to double the recruitment rate and cut costs by 30 percent. “Our engagement was a game-changer for their hiring process,” mentions Scheffler. Similarly, FEL enhanced the recruitment of various enterprises in different branches from crafts work to public sector.
With a background in sports, Lonnemann believes in long term strategies for building expertise and sticking to goals. His sportsman spirit strongly translates into his leadership at FEL, where he instils endurance skills and stays focused even during challenging situations. In his effort, he is supported by a team of HR experts like Scheffler who constantly work toward enhancing the recruitment activities for clients.
Displaying such prowess, FEL now aims to gain further attention of international companies seeking an RPO partner based in Europe. The company also plans to expand its sites abroad. “We aim to gift our clients a workforce with high endurance—the ones who never give up,” says Scheffler. As a roadmap for the future, FEL intends to continue upgrading its customer application tracking and other services to offer ground-breaking talent recruitment services.
