CAF Rail UK
Overview
Following a tender process, Ford & Stanley was selected as sole supplier of recruitment services for CAF Rail UK Ltd. The recruitment service includes permanent placements, the supply of temporary works and fixed-term contract requirements.
Scope & Approach
The scope of the services covers all disciplines of worker, ranging from production and logistics operatives at CAF’s Newport manufacturing plant through to skilled rolling stock technicians
involved in reliability, testing and commissioning of CAF’s rolling stock on their customers sites. We also are responsible for all “white collar” roles including Project Support Engineers, Project Managers, Maintenance Managers, Team Leaders, Buyers, HR and Administration.
Account Management and Delivery
We are responsible for end-to-end recruitment. This includes attraction, pre-screening, shortlisting, virtual and face to face interview processes, on-boarding, inductions, compliance, supply of workwear, worker reviews and candidate aftercare.
We provide a dedicated Account Management Team that includes an Account Director, Senior Account Manager and Key Account Manager. The team is supported by our delivery, compliance and business support team based in Derby.
We are present on daily HR huddles to enable us to react to immediate operational situations and discuss workforce planning, so our delivery teams are forewarned of any peaks in requirements. There are monthly, quarterly and annual reviews to assess the service, this is a documented process where we cover operational performance during the period, review performance against KPI’s, identify any red flags and risks to the business and put in action plans to address any issues.
The Account Management team act as a single point of contact for the customer. They are client facing and hold regular face to face meetings to develop relationships with the hiring managers but to also meet the temporary workers we are supplying.
Attraction
We worked with CAF to develop an Employer Value Proposition, which assists with how we showcase CAF and to provide candidates in a skill short market. We interviewed CAF employees and included their experience in the EVP. This provides a consistent approach when we go to market and is important in the attraction and retention of candidates.
One of our differentiators from other recruitment and talent services businesses is our Discovery Processes. This is an enhanced job take on. Candidate availability is sparce and we need to provide candidates with a full understanding of the role that is more than a job description and salary. The full Discovery Process for permanent roles and the more condensed discovery for temporary roles reduces the candidate dropout rate in the recruitment process. Our statistics show that using the Discovery Process in combination with our Sounding Board process reduces the dropout rate by 50%.
Using these processes for CAF we achieved hit rates of 94% filled 1st time for temporary roles and 88% filled first time for permanent roles.
Compliance and administration
We have a dedicated team who manage the compliance of the temporary workers. For every new starter, we provide a HR Starter Pack which includes all right to work documentation, pre-assignment medical and drug and alcohol screenings, qualifications, references and any role specific competencies. We also continue to manage this, organising further compliance as needed.
Ramp up
In 2021, there was a need to significantly increase build rate in Newport. To facilitate this, we proposed to CAF that we would run a recruitment day on a Saturday and manage the end-to-end process. We organised 50 candidates to attend and managed the day on behalf of the customer, this resulted in the client selecting 30 of the candidates for immediate starts with the remaining candidate’s talent pooled for future opportunities.
Supporting Corporate Social Responsibility
Our account management team are actively involved with the customer regarding Women in Rail and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives. We have volunteered to be included and are actively working with CAF so that we can take these initiatives and incorporate into the recruitment processes. As part of our contract, we contribute several CSR hours per contract year.
In addition, as part of Ford & Staney’s ‘Better Workdays Conservation Meadow’ project on CAF’s behalf we plant ‘A Tree for Every Placement’ collectively funding the planting of an oak tree following a permanent placement.
What this means is that, irrespective of the nature of that person’s employment up to 500 years of daily environmental benefit will be realised as a direct result.
The ‘Better Workdays Conservation Meadow’ was established in 2018 by Ford & Stanley to support conservation efforts around the world, a three-acre conservation site in Derbyshire dedicated to supporting conservation as well as teamwork and mental fitness.
The partnership between our businesses continues to evolve and deepen as time and again Ford & Stanley step up to the plate to deliver solutions which meet our evolving demands. Their recent proactivity in sustainability initiatives shows their cultural alignment to CAF as Danielle and the team continue to embed themselves with our business.
Key Stats
Locations supplied
15 locations across the UK