Success Factors

The Situation

During SuccessFactors’ initial growth in the UK, they’d favoured the approach of having an internal recruiter to handle their hiring, with some success in this model.  However, once they parted company with this internal recruiter, they had no pipeline or method to deliver against a number of key UK sales hires.

The Problem

They needed fast results, as the headcount had been approved and the UK Country Manager was already managing a target for those hires, without the people in place to deliver against those results.

Furthermore, while having to manage multiple hires, the UK CM needed to focus on delivering revenue, as this was a small team environment.

SuccessFactors needed a stop-gap solution to provide key people while they rebuilt their internal recruitment team.

The Solution

The initial decision made by SuccessFactors was to engage with numerous recruitment companies and harvest the best candidates that came through.  While this model didn’t suit Oakstone or their experience of delivering the best results in the fastest manner, we were keen to assist SuccessFactors where possible and took the opportunity to demonstrate what we could deliver.

The Outcome

Oakstone proceeded to make all the placements in the UK sales team over the next 12 months, immediately placing 4 out of 4 sales guys hired in the first 5 months.  The UK Country Manager then opted to work with Oakstone on an exclusive basis for further key hires having been impressed by the professionalism, quality and speed of results.

When SuccessFactors subsequently rebuilt their internal recruitment team, the strategic and often exclusive agreement with Oakstone remained in place (even after SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors in late 2011), and to this day Oakstone work alongside this team, complimenting them on specific hires.

Oakstone has gone on to place three inside salespeople, two sales directors and a further three strategic enterprise salespeople. They remain a dependable partner working to bring in top talent to a vastly changing company.