How Balfour Beatty Transformed Its Talent Sourcing Strategy

Balfour Beatty is a leading international infrastructure group. With 26,000 employees, the company provides innovative and efficient infrastructure that underpins peoples’ daily lives, supports communities, and enables economic growth. Balfour Beatty finances, develops, builds and maintains complex infrastructure such as transportation, power and utility systems, social and commercial buildings. Its main geographies are the UK, US and Hong Kong. Over the last 100 years, Balfour Beatty has created iconic buildings and infrastructure all over the world, including the London Olympics’ Aquatic Centre, Hong Kong’s first Zero Carbon building, the National Museum of the Marine Corps in the US, and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link.

The UK construction industry has an ambitious growth plan over the coming years, and the demand for talented professionals across the industry is becoming tougher – with many companies vying to hire candidates with a specific skill set and profile. The Balfour Beatty Resourcing team knew that if they were to stay ahead, they would have to pivot their approach to acquiring qualified top talent. They wanted to move away from manual processes, reduce reliance on agencies, and achieve more visibility into their talent pipelines.

Led by Samantha Ramsay, UK Head of Resourcing at Balfour Beatty, the business underwent significant transformation in its approach to talent acquisition and engagement.

“To support the growth trajectory of Balfour Beatty, we needed to shift from a reactive to a proactive hiring model – and Beamery has given us the tools to do this effectively.”

SAMANTHA RAMSAY
UK Head of Resourcing, Balfour Beatty

Building a modern resourcing process

“The days of transactional hiring are over – we know that top talent comes from rich candidate journeys. This is why providing a multi-channel interaction, from first-touch to last interview, is critical,” commented Samantha. “To support the growth trajectory of Balfour Beatty, we needed to shift from a reactive to a proactive hiring model – and Beamery has given us the tools to do this effectively.”

The Resourcing team at Balfour Beatty identified the job families within the business that required a more proactive approach to the engagement of talent and talent pipelining. The aim of this was to attract and pool top candidates within the “scarce skills” job families across the organization: Commercial, Engineering, Planning and Project Management. They were then able to automate their tactics to identify, attract and engage candidates for these specific categories.

“Through Beamery, the team are able to build and nurture talent pools for scarce skills – creating multi-touch, personalized campaigns to attract candidates. We then grow and nurture our relationship with talent based on their profile and interests, through various activities – such as targeted emails, company updates and even webinar registration pages and invitations – all hosted by Beamery,” commented Samantha.

Balfour Beatty has proven they can deliver the right message, to the right people, at the right time, through Beamery’s intelligent automation and Recipes functionality – achieving an average 70% open rate and 36% click-through rate across their email campaigns. This is far exceeding industry benchmarks.

“Taking a more proactive approach to resourcing with Beamery has enabled us to fill permanent positions quicker, without having to rely on purely reactive hiring or outsourcing to agencies,” said Samantha. “I’m excited to now scale this strategy across the entire candidate lifecycle – more recently launching our internal mobility and alumni programme via the platform.”