As one of the largest engineering companies in Australia, UGL knows how to overcome obstacles when building everything from power plants to rail systems. Last year, the North Sydney–based company was faced with a hurdle of a different kind — finding engineers in a tight talent market.

UGL, which has over 7,000 employees, needed to hire more than 70 engineers and project managers to work on transportation infrastructure projects, wind farms, and other major construction projects. Among the critical roles UGL had to fill were rail systems and rail signalling engineers, highly specialized fields where talent is scarce.

Hiring engineers locally, in Australia, posed major challenges. Australia is in the midst of an infrastructure boom and is facing an engineer shortage. Just 8.5% of Australian university students graduate with engineering degrees — compared with more than 12% in Canada and more than 23% in Germany — not enough to keep up with growing demand.

To meet its target, UGL would have to recruit workers internationally and convince them to move to Australia. That task, as well as other ambitious recruiting assignments, fell to the company’s hard-working recruiting department which had fewer than 40 people on board last year. 

UGL’s recruitment team turned to LinkedIn Talent Insights,  a talent analytics tool, to pinpoint where engineers were concentrated across the globe. With the data in hand, the engineering company was able to focus its advertising and outreach in the appropriate places. 

The upshot: UGL met its hiring goal, landing 70 specialized engineers and project managers, and cut an estimated three weeks out of the usual hiring process.

Companies can move from decisions based on gut instinct to data-driven action

Things could have easily turned out differently. UGL’s hiring managers had their own ideas about where to look for talent, much of it based on instinct rather than on research, says Jane Wood, national resourcing manager at UGL. 

“Everyone,” Jane says, “had an idea on where they thought the talent would be hiding, but this was based on individual research or a gut feel. Once we were able to show them the data, it made the sourcing a lot more structured, contained, and easier to manage and led to a more cost-effective approach.”

UGL’s recruitment team generated a LinkedIn Talent Insights talent pool report that showed the distributions of different types of engineers globally, as well as engineer workforce trends. The report highlighted regions around the world where various categories of engineers worked, the growth rate for that role in that region, the hiring demand for that role in that area, as well as the top employers for that role in the region. 

Among the important takeaways for UGL: The United Kingdom has a high concentration of a number of the types of engineers UGL was seeking. For example, the data showed that the U.K. had twice the number of engineers with railway systems experience as did Australia, Dubai, South Africa, and the Philippines combined. As a result, the recruitment team decided to focus a portion of its advertising dollars in the U.K. 

But UGL mined the report for other opportunities and found, for example, that the demand for engineers with railway systems experience was quite low in the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia. They also found that South Africa had a rich supply of schedulers and project controls managers. 

In addition to looking at global talent pools, UGL’s recruitment team pulled company reports on the top employers of engineers around the world. These reports showed the average tenure for different types of engineers at those companies. UGL then used that information when planning its outreach to potential hires. Employers with high attrition rates became obvious targets.

“Once we had the report,” Jane says, “we were able to target companies that had higher attrition or where the employees had three to five years tenure. We believed that these were the candidates who were more likely to be seeking new opportunities.”

Insights into Australia’s talent market prompted UGL to adjust its employer branding

LinkedIn Talent Insights also provided some important information about local talent. While Australia is facing an engineer shortage, the country still ranks among the regions with the most engineers in the world. 

That finding led to some questions: How can UGL do a better job tapping homegrown talent and what message does it want to send? 

UGL decided that being a place where local engineers work on game-changing projects in their home country is a powerful message for both retaining its current employees and attracting new ones. The company began weaving employee stories into its employer branding efforts.

Data helped persuade hiring managers to change their search criteria

LinkedIn Talent Insights also helped the UGL recruitment team overcome another obstacle: convincing hiring managers to adjust their search criteria. 

The recruiting team was able to demonstrate that engineers who had fewer years of experience than hiring managers initially sought were working on major construction projects. By lowering the number of years of experience they were seeking, hiring managers could greatly expand the talent pool without sacrificing quality.

“A lot of the hiring managers,” Jane says, “had a preconceived view on the criteria and location of the engineers that they wanted. But once we were able to show them the Talent Insights report, where we had broadened the search criteria, they could see that the target list increased.  This was beneficial as hiring managers drew on their own experiences and started to provide more input into the search criteria.” 

Final thoughts

UGL turned to LinkedIn Talent Insights to gain real-time insights into the global talent pool for engineers. As a result, the company was able to focus its recruitment marketing efforts in the right locations and avoid wasting time and resources in the wrong places. That helped cut a significant amount of time from the hiring process.

On top of that, LinkedIn Talent Insights helped UGL’s recruitment team build credibility with the company’s hiring managers and with the UGL executive team. By using the data effectively, the recruiters showed they have a strategic plan for how to approach the international market. 
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by Phyllis Furman