Aurélie Humblet

Key figures of the collaboration

About Safran

The Safran group employs more than 100.000 collaborators on 276 sites in 27 countries.

Its international dimension enables Safran to establish strong and lasting relationships with most of the aeronautics stakeholders and airline companies at global level. This worldwide presence reflects the willingness of the group to offer his clients reactivity and proximity and to increase its competitiveness.

Safran Aero Boosters (SAB) is a subsidiary that designs, develops and produces modules, equipment and test cells for aircraft and space engines. Based in Belgium, SAB has two subsidiaries in the United Sates and employs 2.000 people.

The Challenge

Right after Covid, SAB immediately went back to business and the number of recruitments suddenly and dramatically increased.

The company went from a total hire freeze to a sudden increase of hiring requests that were also very urgent. This is not always easy to manage: it was crucial to be super reactive and fast as a lot of teams were too tight to cope with the new growth.

At that time, we actually recruited one extra person to focus on recruitment but while the numbers kept growing, we started to look at new solutions. Profile Group, who was already collaborating with us, presented their RPO service. We agreed to look into the RPO solution a bit closer and give it a try.

The RPO solution

Our RPO solution has been implemented progressively with, at the start, only one on-site Profile Group recruiter in order to carry out a full audit in collaboration with all the business units with the objective of analyzing the actual recruitment needs.

Hiring predictions at the beginning of 2023 were at around 90 but, in the end, we finalized 195 recruitments that year. This number was totally unprecedented and could not have been predicted at the beginning of the year.

Profile Group is always very reactive and can provide new consultants depending on the hiring needs. We started with one consultant and went to 5 within a year. Today we have a smaller team.

Beyond managing recruitments, Profile Group also brought positive changes to the process. A real synergy has developed between Safran Aero Boosters & Profile Group, it's a mix between SAB's culture & process and Profile Group's recruitment expertise that has enabled the development of a solid methodology.

Our Results

• Very high numbers of technical recruitments taken care by Profile Group's recruiters in year 2: Beyond the numbers, the challenge was also to recruit many engineers & technical profiles which are difficult to find in a very tight candidate market.
• Higher level of satisfaction for our managers: In the past and due to many reasons, our managers did not trust our capacity to recruit great talent and felt discouraged whenever they had to recruit. Today, they globally feel very well supported by the Profile Group team. As the Profile Group recruiters are on site, there is a real proximity and better daily contacts with all our managers. The in-house setup is a big plus for all managers as they feel it is easy to meet up and talk.
• Implementation of strategic projects: Profile Group RPO team also worked on the company's communication and visibility. Together we started setting up more internal and external events such as job days, organisation of an open door event to present SAB or set up of a training for all managers.
• Extra agility as we can adjust the Profile Group team to our needs.
• Dramatic reduction of the recruitment costs thanks to a flexible pricing model
• Profile Group's RPO is the best of both worlds: we benefit from Profile Group's expertise while we use the positive image and culture of SAB.