Case studies

We were contacted by the owner of a company, managing forests and ponds. He had acquired a trout farm in a remote part of the Czech Republic a few years ago and lost the team in charge of its operations.

The owner had tried different ways to find a new manager and team, he had contacted a university to hire young graduates specialized in fishery and also invited a specialist from abroad. Both approaches proved not successful. Together with the experienced head of the Fishery department ready to coach the new hire, we defined an activity based profile for the position to be hired. The main benefit offered was an apartment provided in the location enabling geographical mobility.

Finally, we placed a candidate with a very different professional background: he was working as a Shop Manager for an international sports retailer and had a life-long passion for fishing. He moved to the location together with his young family.

We were approached by an aviation company asked to help with the recruitment of a Paintshop Manager. Extensive professional experience and knowledge of technologies were as important as English skills to communicate with clients and management skills to take control of a team lacking leadership for a time.

Our client knew his market well, expected the recruitment to be difficult and therefore asked for a search. We contacted dozens of paintshop managers, thus one of the prerequisites was always missing. In the end, we managed to get to a candidate who spent his entire career at one big car repair shop & dealer.

He had never considered a change, as he did not believe he could join both his craft and his professional interest in aviation. Together with our client, we managed to convince him that the position ticked exactly those two boxes. He accepted the offer and joined the company after handing over all his duties at his current employer.

For several years, we have been cooperating with a client developing a new treatment for cancer supporting them in the creation of specialized teams for pre-clinical research. The requirements in terms of skills and experience were very strict (postdocs) and highly specialized, and most individuals with relevant experience were not working in the Czech Republic.

The only efficient approach was to follow up on Phd students having studied or worked at Czech scientific institutions.

And that’s where our detective work began. Scientists live to publish, but their online footprint in social networks is minimal. If they don’t publish, they are hidden behind flasks in their lab. With Covid and home-office, they became almost unreachable.

In addition, each of them is specialized in a very narrow topic, even if their vitaes look similar at the first glance. So, finding the right match required understanding both our clients’ activity and the track record of the candidates.

We learnt to understand university education and the life-cycle of potential candidates in scientific institutions, to reveal individual orientations, specializations and functions within scientific teams, and, last but not least, to connect and establish contacts with this specific target group. Through systematic search and networking we managed to identify a number of scientists and convinced them of their professional and scientific future with our client.

Our customer, a joint venture of a financial investor and construction company, entered the Czech market with a large project in linear construction. We faced the challenge of finding construction engineers specialized in maintenance, health/safety/security, project management and BIM management. English skills were needed to communicate with international management and stakeholders, which is still not common in the profession. To find the right candidates we used networking based on previous experience from civil engineering projects, active search and advertisement. We succeeded in building a functional team of 8 professionals. Not only have they launched the whole project in time, they seem highly motivated and satisfied working together.

Our long-term client, a company headquartered in Asia, is continuously building its European HQ in Prague. We helped to hire the financial team facing the challenge to search Financial Analysts or professionals from Treasury or Credit risk in a completely over-stressed employment market.

We profited from a special feature of our client, i.e. it’s openness to hire non-Czech candidates with relevant experience in the Czech and Slovak republics, as the exclusive working language for most of the positions is English.

Due to the enormous demand for financial positions candidates were slipping through our fingers. We learnt to speed-up decision making together with the client, as candidates are always choosing between offers. We are proud of helping them to form a successful international and relatively stable team of professionals developing their own specific company culture.

An international client from the construction machinery industry decided to move its EMEA headquarters from Belgium to the Czech Republic, about an hour drive from Prague.

Several hundred jobs requiring precise qualifications and extensive experience were transferred from Belgium, and 50 employees holding key skills and experience moved to the new headquarters. At the same time, managers working in the Czech location decided to quit the company.

The task consisted thus of reconstructing 8 specialized departments with an EMEA scope in the Czech Republic according to the specifications of an international board in constant move.

To support our client, we created a consulting team with 5 consultants acting as responsible Account managers for 1-2 departments. We integrated an external recruiter and appointed a Project manager in charge of communication with the HR department. Beside sourcing and hiring we were also providing regular reporting on the whole process during 2 years.

Finally, we helped with the hiring of HR professionals and handed them over the staffing agenda.

Within 18 months, we filled 56 local and international managers and specialists and contributed to a successful transition of the company serving their clients regardless of tumultuous organizational changes.