Slow mobilisation is rarely just a TA problem, everyone in the process has a role to play
When a project is not getting the resources it needs quickly enough, the finger usually gets pointed at HR. Sometimes that is the right place for it, but more often than not, when you look at the data properly, the picture is more complicated.
During my time as TA Manager for Worley across the Middle East and Africa, I did this kind of diagnostic work across most of Worley’s locations in the region, mapping the hiring and mobilisation data at every step of the process to identify where time was being lost. The approach was always data driven and the findings were rarely what people expected.
On major projects in Saudi Arabia, and throughout the region, the first few months of a project can make or break it. There is often significant pressure to get a large number of people mobilised quickly, with liquidated damages against key roles, client expectations to manage and the company’s commercial position and reputation at stake. Making your hiring and mobilisation process as efficient as possible and identifying where those delays are happening is therefore not just an HR concern, it is a commercial imperative for the business as a whole.
This was exactly the situation at Worley in Saudi Arabia and where I most recently applied that experience. I was a People Business Partner at the time and while I had no responsibility for the TA function in the Kingdom, the People Director asked me to work alongside the local TA team to identify where the hiring and mobilisation process was losing time. Worley was making more than 550 hires a year across the business in the Kingdom, one particular project needed more than 300 people mobilised in the first six months and was already behind, and time to mobilise across the business was averaging 100 days from opening a requisition to day one on site.
I spent several weeks working alongside the TA and mobilisation team, pulling six months of data and mapping every stage of the process from requisition approval through to day one on site. What the data showed was that time was being lost at almost every stage of the process, and the picture was more complicated than anyone had assumed going in.
The data pointed to delays at almost every stage of the process. These were the main ones:
There was no staffing plan. With more than 300 roles required urgently, the TA team had no visibility of which positions were needed and when, and had no basis for prioritising one role over another. As a result, everything moved slower than it should.
•Hiring managers were taking up to two weeks to review submitted candidates and the same again to arrange interviews. The same managers who were escalating resourcing concerns to the project and location leadership were not prioritising resourcing the project or delegating actions.
Once interviews were completed, hiring decisions were taking ten days on average. In a competitive market for experienced engineering talent, candidates do not wait that long.
Offers for in-demand candidates were taking too long to prepare, with the TA team following the standard process rather than treating urgent roles any differently, and internal approval was adding further delay on top.
Once offers were out, mobilisation was being held up by a lengthy client approval process that no one was actively managing or pushing back on.
Working with the TA team, hiring managers and project leadership, we agreed a set of practical changes that addressed each of the problem areas the data had identified:
Service level commitments were put in place at every stage of the process and agreed with everyone involved. Hiring manager feedback within 48 hours, interviews within three business days of that feedback, delegated to functional managers where project hiring managers could not commit the time. SLAs that people have agreed to are far easier to hold people to than ones that have been imposed on them.
A clear staffing plan with prioritised roles and mobilisation dates was produced, giving the TA team the visibility they had been missing from the start.
A streamlined offer approval process was agreed specifically for this project with project and location leadership, reducing what had in some cases been eight separate approval steps down to what was actually necessary.
Visa processing started as soon as a candidate had agreed draft terms, running in parallel with formal offer approval rather than waiting for it to complete.
The project director nominated someone specifically to track and manage client approval timelines. The data they gathered was used to challenge the client directly, and the outcome was an agreed streamlined approval process with client interviews required only for key positions.
The changes reduced average time to mobilise from 100 days to 66 days. Every day those 550 annual hires were on the ground earlier was worth around AUD 160,000 in additional billable revenue. Across 34 days, the potential impact was in the region of AUD 5.4 million per year. For a business operating on tight project margins with liquidated damages exposure on key roles, that number is hard to ignore.
If your projects are mobilising slower than they should, we can tell you exactly where the time is going and what needs to change. Get in touch and one of us will come back to you directly.
