Wesleyan Assurance & Arras
Quality Candidates Get Results
"The candidate performed well at her interview and made a very good impression."
Wesleyan Group is the umbrella organization for the Wesleyan Assurance Society (a mutual Society founded in 1841) but today a leading FSA regulated financial services organization manufacturing a range of financial products. Growth within the business had led the Head of Business Planning & Change Management to look for a financial project manager to deliver new product and customer service improvement projects. Arras People were the firm Wesleyan Assurance turned to for sound financial project management recruitment.
Blending Project Management skills with financial services experience
The key challenge was identifying candidates who had possessed solid financial services project management. The financial project management recruitment process was also likely to be lengthy (3 stage and include an online test of verbal and numerical reasoning).
Keeping the candidate comfortable with the process was a challenge especially when other offers were on the table from other organisations. The final offer had to come from the HR department and this created a delay which needed managing to prevent the candidate feeling neglected and accepting counter offers.
The "Quality over Quantity" Placement Perspective: Less is More
Four candidates were sent in by the Arras consultant, with one of those four selected for interview. The candidate had only recently been made redundant from another financial services role and was immediately available.
Here's some feedback from the client on the final interview:
The candidate performed well at her interview and made a very good impression. We are taking a little bit longer with our deliberations as the candidate is one of two strong candidates we interviewed and we are exploring whether or not we can justify two positions
The candidate was offered the role and commenced at the end of February 2011.
The project management marketplace has seen some dramatic changes since 2008 and the onset of the economic downturn; not least a lack of fluidity in the market, which is the movement created in the job market when people naturally move from one organisation to another looking for a new challenge. The marketplace also saw further slowdown with an increased time to hire - partly due to organisational confidence about hiring within an uncertain economic outlook.
Project Accountant
Santander, the banking and finance group, were specifically looking for a Project Accountant to join the project management team within the London headquarters. The Project Accountant was responsible for developing, implementing and maintaining a robust Project Accounting function to enable the organisation to efficiently and effectively forecast, monitor and report on all aspects of Project ‘spend’ (resource, hardware, contractual etc). Arras People focuses on specialist roles within programme and project management, contact us today for more information.
Business Change Roles
Barclays, the high street banking organisation, approached Arras People for a business change recruitment campaign. Looking for a number of different levels of positions from programme managers to project managers and business analysts, business change experience was key.
Arras People work quickly and efficiently on large scale recruitment campaigns; our account management and team structure is perfectly organised to meet flexible and dynamic recruitment campaigns