Marcus Webb Associates has experience of sourcing people and placing them internationally, however this project in Sweden required a lot of research, networking and understanding of the local market to fulfil.

A UK client of ours successfully won new business with some Swedish based automotive OEMs and needed support locally to help deliver these programmes. The idea was to engage contractors / consultants to work onsite with the customers.

Our client needed people that had experience of working with the automotive OEMs they were supporting, an understanding of Swedish culture and language, as well as the right technical skills and experience.

The biggest challenges initially were understanding the differences between the Swedish and UK markets, how contractors / consultants work and operate and the rates of pay. More logistical investigations surrounding contract terms, taxes etc, came later but initially we needed to do a lot of information gathering to get things moving in the right direction.

We started off by reaching out to our network to understand more about the market and to develop our understanding of working visas, rates of pay and availability of people for the task. Good old-fashioned networking really paid off as we were soon able to establish a reasonable network of people that could help us.

As this project evolved, the information we gathered helped to shape the requirements and understand the limitations. Then it was just a case of identifying people that could meet the needs and join the team!

The Swedish market can certainly move fast and many of our initial candidates disappeared quickly to take up new projects. Our client took this onboard and reacted rapidly when we identified other stronger contenders resulting in a successful engagement!

Overall this project was challenging but rewarding. It proved that collaboration between recruiter and client, coupled with planning and a good amount of networking really pays off. Taking the time to build up knowledge of any market always helps, and this project also proved that tenacity and the willingness to go the extra mile certainly makes the difference!

Since fulfilling this project Marcus Webb Associates has been asked to help deliver more automotive work in Sweden.