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London Gatwick: Reducing time to hire and filling hard to fill construction roles

Overview

London Gatwick, one of the UK’s busiest transport hubs, faced significant challenges in recruiting top talent for critical construction roles. Lengthy time-to-hire, low candidate engagement, and difficulties in filling specialist positions were impacting the organisation’s ability to meet its construction project workforce demands. The partnership between London Gatwick and Omni resulted in a dramatic transformation in its construction talent acquisition strategy, reducing hiring timelines, improving candidate quality and experience and increasing fulfilment rates for hard-to-fill roles.

The Challenges

London Gatwick faced a number of challenges that was largely due to its location and need to hire niche, in demand talent.

  • Excessively long time-to-hire 
  • Low candidate engagement, with fewer than half of submitted CVs leading to interviews 
  • Difficulty in attracting and securing candidates for Commercial, Planning, and Design roles 
  • Struggling advertising and marketing recruitment campaigns, limiting application volume. 

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Solutions Implemented

Omni and London Gatwick worked closely to implement a more agile and results-driven recruitment model. Key initiatives included:

Streamlining Recruitment Processes

Enhancing efficiency in sourcing, screening, and selection to accelerate time-to-hire.

Data-Driven Decision Making

 Leveraging recruitment analytics to identify bottlenecks and improve conversion rates.

Enhanced Advertising & Marketing

Transitioning recruitment content creation and posting responsibilities from London Gatwick to Omni, ensuring targeted, high-impact job advertising.

Optimising Candidate Experience

Improving engagement strategies to increase interview and offer acceptance rates.

Implementing Recruitment Marketing Campaigns

Targeted campaigns across various online channels including social media, Google and relevant Professional Bodies.

Results

The partnership resulted in tangible results that truly transformed London Gatwick's resourcing.

Reduction in time to hire

Time-to-hire reduced by 68%

Higher candidate conversion rates

88% of submitted CVs leading to interviews.

Improved offer rates

56% of interviewed candidates received job offers.

Significant increase in applications

With Omni’s advertising and marketing strategy generating nearly three times more applications, and up to seven times more for some roles.

Increase fulfilment of hard-to-fill roles

Threefold increase in fulfilment of hard-to-fill Commercial, Construction Management and Design roles.

Conclusion

The partnership has transformed construction recruitment, reducing hiring timeframes, improving candidate engagement, and filling specialist roles more effectively, whilst leveraging London Gatwick employer brand and employer value proposition demonstrating how a strategic RPO approach can drive measurable improvements in talent acquisition, ensuring businesses have the right people in place to succeed.

London Gatwick Airport
"Our partnership with Omni is vital in enabling London Gatwick to upscale our construction team and deliver the airports critical capital investment plan. Omni are extremely agile and work hand in glove with our processes, quickly adopting and adapting to changes. Through 2024 as a collaborative team, we made radical improvements to ways of working and bringing innovative ideas to fruition, which has resulted in a notable increase in the quality of candidates, significant reduction in the time to hire and achieving huge gains in hiring manager satisfaction."
Kelly Robinson, Talent Acquisition Manager at London Gatwick
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