Launching a new UK manufacturing site's hiring function from scratch

A UK manufacturer opening a new production site needed to build its entire site workforce from zero, without the time or budget to stand up an in-house recruitment team before the site opened. The business turned to Alliance to run the new site’s hiring end to end.

Building a workforce for a brand-new site carries its own pressures, and this brief had three in particular:

• Scale: a brand-new site meant hiring production, quality and engineering roles from zero, all at once.
• Timeline: building an in-house recruitment function would have taken longer than the site’s opening timeline allowed.
• Scope: hiring needed to be end-to-end — sourcing through to onboarding — not just candidate introductions.

Alliance ran the new site’s hiring as an end-to-end RPO programme, covering sourcing, screening and onboarding so the manufacturer never had to build its own recruitment team for a single site launch.

The same four-step process we use for every Alliance RPO programme applied here — brief us, we search, you interview a shortlist, you hire — and the programme scaled directly to the site’s ramp-up plan as headcount targets were confirmed.

• The site reached its opening-day headcount without the manufacturer hiring its own recruiters.
• Hiring costs came in within Alliance’s typical RPO range of up to 60% lower than running an equivalent in-house team.
• The manufacturer had one RPO partner managing the whole hiring function from day one.

This is a representative scenario, not a named case study. Client details are withheld to protect confidentiality.