The challenge to find, recruit, and retain knowledgeable, skilled individuals to bolster and sustain successful business is common to companies across industries and markets. At Delaware UK, it’s a challenge that the team has been rising to with the aid of the Partner Talent Initiative.
Like so many businesses around the world, Delaware is facing big issues when it comes to recruitment. The shortage of available talent in the market and then having to fight other companies for talent when it’s available is a drain on Delaware’s time and resources.
“It’s unsustainable,” says David Taylor, head of Growth Initiatives at Delaware. “We’re a smaller business, but we’ve got big targets for growth. We’re aiming to triple our size in the next three to five years. That means we need access to great people. Now the challenge for us is that we don’t have the same resources as bigger companies. We don’t have a big team of people building that pipeline of talent for us.”
Step forward SAP and the Partner Talent Initiative.
“It’s a really helpful mechanism to attract great people. It gives us the chance to take advantage of SAP’s reach and reputation to get in front of candidates who wouldn’t necessarily have heard of Delaware otherwise,” explains Taylor.
The other challenge the initiative has helped Delaware address has been finding experienced individuals who can bring a wider range of skills and insights to the table.
“For SAP partners like us to establish a strong pipeline of talent and meet the needs of our clients, we really need to diversify our strategies,” says Kaity Cloke, senior recruitment consultant at Delaware. “We need to be looking at bringing new people into the industry, people who have different, diverse skill sets, who can support the work that we do. The Partner Talent Initiative is really helping us to address those issues.”
Indeed, Taylor goes on to say that some of the best consultants they’ve hired have been people who have worked in a specific industry already, rather than only ever working as a consultant.
“The initiative gives us access to a pool of experienced candidates from a variety of different backgrounds, many of whom have experience of living in the real world,” he adds. “It gives us a different outlook than if we were only hiring people from our graduate scheme, and we aren’t competing against other companies for these candidates.”
So far, Taylor and Cloke have hired three people, two into the finance team and one onto the SAP SuccessFactors team, namely Caroline McDonald, whose story is featured here.
“One of the real values of the Partner Talent Initiative is that we can go to SAP and tell them our pain points, the areas where we need to bring people in, and they shape the initiative to suit us and address those issues. It’s a really collaborative approach,” says Taylor. “It also means that SAP takes on a lot of the hard work of finding talent for us. For us, it’s a no-brainer to know that we have access to such fantastic talent to support our growth. It’s an opportunity that’s been too good to pass up.”
Find out more about the initiative here or contact the team at partneracademy@sap.com.