Big 4 Professional Services Company
Win the competition
for talent with aspaara!
With the support of MatchingCore®, a big 4 Professional Services firm initiated a pilot program in order to turn their employee feedback into tangible and satisfying changes. During their audits, newly promoted Senior Associates were able to share personal their personal preferences. This enabled the company to provide bespoke annual planning tailored to the ambitions of their freshly promoted talent.
44%
of hours were spent working on preferred industries
95%
of talent could be diverted from projects if they had other client preferences
76%
of conflict hours resolved
"We see that the new generation has other demands, they want to have control over their own planning (…), and do what they think is important for their development and we want to support that.”
Ronald Heinz
Senior Manager Planning & Operations
Successful recruiting despite talent shortages
“As a firm that wants and needs to grow continuously, the main challenge we are currently facing is the shortage of talents” Roland Heinz, Manager for Planning and Operations, makes clear. The lack of talent availability is a challenge many professional services firms currently face. At the company, the awareness of decreasing student numbers in accounting is countered by paying increased attention to recruiting within competitive job markets. By investing in strategies which successfully attract and retain their best talent matches.
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This is why the company has turned to aspaara in order to help optimize their own audit and planning for the coming fiscal year.
Talent knows what it wants
With the help of the MatchingCore® software, the company freed 95% of future Senior Associates from jobs they did not want to continue working on. In return, they were assigned jobs with clients within their preferred industries.
The expectation that negative feedback would become more prevalent in connection with certain clients, was not confirmed. Instead, responses turned out to be surprisingly individual.“We were afraid that specific clients would be mentioned a lot as a negative preference and that was not the case. Only 9% of clients were mentioned as negative preference and those 9% were only mentioned by one or two people”, Ronald Heinz emphasises. It turns out that talent knows what it wants, and even better what they don’t want! In these cases, if employees had not already been planned in for jobs, client continuity was forfeited.
The end result are 44% of total working hours assigned to work within a preferred industry. Furthermore, by making full use of MatchingCore®, the number of unassigned hours was reduced by 19% overall, while 76% of time conflicts were resolved.
What's up next?
This project focused only on the preferences of one specific talent grade. As a next step, the company wants to optimize the planning of whole teams, including all available jobgrades.
“In the future we want to have an even broader scope and take the entire team’s preference into account. The talent has indicated, that a team and engagement manager is always important, but if you remove several people from a team, that preference based planning won’t work out”, says Johanna Olaf, Digital Workforce Manager.