The opportunity
When I first joined Nine, Latitude IT were already an established recruitment partner of the business, with a strong internal reputation for sourcing outstanding talent across our technology teams.
At the beginning of my tenure, the wider business was going through a restructuring phase largely driven by the merger with Fairfax. James' insights into not only recruitment processes, but systems and platforms were a huge help in empowering me to take control of my role at an early stage.
During this merger, a key focus for the group was to start taking a full lifecycle approach to recruitment and moving away from a hiring manager lead process to one driven by the talent acquisition team. James and the Latitude team were instrumental in ensuring this was successful by helping me get buy-in from hiring managers and providing insights into how similar businesses were structuring their teams.
The process
We started attacking this shift in mindset and approach by undertaking an audit of the current recruitment agencies on our panel, with the aim of understanding the performance trends of our partners and narrowing our focus on who we wanted to continue working with.
We then introduced a comms platform allowing us to communicate with agencies to improve our talent sourcing efficiencies. Even with this system in place, Latitude has continued to take a human-centred approach that’s enabled us to provide a consistently positive candidate experience throughout our interview process.
While hiring for a new role, Latitude often acts as a sounding board and provide market insights which help me and hiring managers to shape job roles and descriptions. They’re very transparent in their approach to procuring talent, especially for difficult to source roles, which also speeds up the process. Their approach to vetting candidates, not just in terms of technical ability but cultural fit is also second to none.
The results
James and the team have been instrumental in aiding our selection of technology providers, resulting in Nine signing a long-term deal with Smart Recruiter for the provision of our applicant tracking software.
As a recruitment consultancy, Latitude has embedded themselves within our system as a strategic partner with a track record of procuring high-quality candidates that are culturally aligned with our business, who regularly go on to build long careers at Nine.
They also continued to provide valuable insights into the wider job market, understanding and preventing skill shortages within our teams through their proactive approach. I have no reservations about putting Latitude directly in touch with our hiring managers, which isn’t something you can always do.
James and the team would be my first point of contact for efficient recruitment services in the tech space.
