How our relationship with easyJet has really taken off.
easyJet is one of the largest airlines in the world, with 347 aircraft, operating 1,099 routes across 35 countries and 160 airports. They use their operational efficiency and leading positions in primary airports to deliver low fares for customers – making great value travel accessible for everyone.
Their challenges
In 2022 easyJet’s MSP, which covered contingent recruitment of all skill sets & seniorities in professional, technical and clerical disciplines, abruptly ended when their incumbent supplier withdrew from the MSP market. With little time to put a new solution in place, easyJet quickly went out to tender to explore the market and ultimately appoint a new MSP partner. Throughout this process they outlined the need for a good cultural fit as a priority focus and identified three key challenges they were looking to solve upon appointing their new partner:
After a competitive tender exercise, Matchtech were appointed as their new MSP provider due to our technical skill delivery, easyJet's trust in our ability to implement quickly and effectively and our close cultural alignment.
Our proposed solution
Our solution was based around short implementation timescales, whilst also building trust with key easyJet stakeholders in our ability to deliver and was made up of:
- A Master Vendor model: Targeting >80% direct fulfilment in year one 1 and >90% direct fulfilment in year 2.
- A dedicated solution team: Comprising solutions experts, Aerospace, Technology & Professional Services delivery experts, supply chain management & coordination and contractor onboarding & compliance support, all overseen by a Solution Manager.
- Quarterly and on demand reporting: Providing easyJet with quarterly and ad-hoc reports against SLAs & KPIs to ensure we maintained a continuous improvement approach to our service.
- Our high-touch relationship & performance management: Ensuring our partnership was a success and increase buy-in from easyJet stakeholders, we held sessions with easyJet's key communities and hiring managers to understand their process priorities and challenges. This allowed us to build relationships with easyJet stakeholders, find out what's important to them and adapt our solution's processes accordingly. We agreed regular communication touch points to ensure the relationships we built were maintained.
- A high-speed implementation programme: Ensuring that our solution was implemented to easyJet's desired eight-week timescales.
- Our added value services: Offering various added value initiatives to enhance our service and ensure continued compliance.
We have provided more information on implementation and our added value service offering below:
Implementation
The industry standard implementation process for an MSP usually takes between 12 - 16 weeks.
Working to an eight-week target meant that we needed to act quickly to ensure that easyJet's business needs were met during this transitional period. We TUPE’d their prior Account Manager, Bethan Thomas, who was already familiar with easyJet's processes and well regarded by their internal TA teams. We then formulated a Solution team for easyJet, composed of consultants who are passionate about the aerospace sector. Bethan was able to educate our internal team on easyJet's processes, which helped to expedite the implementation process. We were also already familiar with their chosen technology, 'Simplify VMS', which further helped to ensure a successful eight-week turnaround.
After contractor migrations, we utilised our in-house delivery brand, Matchtech, to begin working on direct delivery of all new resource requirements and conducted a full audit of the current supply chain to ensure any additional resource delivery could be fulfilled.
Added value services
As well as providing a tailored solution to meet (and exceed) easyJet's requirements, we provided added value initiatives as part of our service, as outlined below.
Marketing support
In order to amplify their brand and provide greater reach for their job adverts, our marketing team:
- Designed branded assets for use on social media and easyJet's own website
- Created a microsite to advertise vacancies and provide more information promoting easyJet's brand
- Held brand training sessions with our consultants to boost how we promote easyJet's vacancies
An example of the microsite has been shown to the right and you can view the full page by clicking the box below.
Market insight reports
We provided easyJet with quarterly and ad-hoc insight reports to give valuable information on market trends, rate benchmarking, candidate availability and current or upcoming legislative changes and their impact.
Our reports for easyJet highlighted the unnecessary costs of their internal TA team working roles alongside our Solutions team. This resulted in cost savings, as well as an increased time-to-hire due to the allocation of specialist roles directly through Matchtech.
A screenshot of our latest STEM market insight report has been shown to the left and you can view the full report by clicking the box below.
Compliance
To ensure compliance, improve the candidate journey and give consultants full visibility to manage documentation for contractor onboarding we utilise the Tifo technology platform which provides:
- A branded dashboard for tracking onboarding progress, document uploading and collation
- A full audit trail for compliance and seamless integration with our CRM, Bullhorn
- Faster referencing through access to electronic checking services
- Email scheduling for better contractor engagement
- Docusign integration for quicker signatures
As testament to the excellent partnership we built and the efficient and high-performing solution we put together, easyJet requested further support outside of our MSP.
The results
We have maintained a very strong delivery across easyJet’s roles, requiring minimal supply chain support, enabling us to evolve our solution and offer various added value services, saving time and money for easyJet. The MSP covered contingent recruitment of all skill sets in professional, technical and clerical disciplines from low level roles up to top-level senior roles.
Our performance against initially agreed KPIs has been outlined below:
Some other key results of our relationship to date are shown below:
51% decrease in time-to-hire
100% overall fulfilment
£150k cost savings in 2024
Outstanding client satisfaction
Our service for easyJet, including our smooth implementation, added value, senior level investment and overall company culture has been summed up in the following testimonial from easyJet's head of TA shortly after implementation:
“We began the search for a new supplier in April 2022. After a thorough review of the market and meeting various companies through our RFI and RFP pitches, we selected Matchtech in July - and I am pleased to say we haven't been disappointed. We transitioned to them fully on 1 September (with an 8 week turnaround!).
There are four things that have really stood out for me:
1. The implementation; the plan, the team they put behind it the comms to contractors, the one to one meetings as required, the leadership team briefings that they attended. Everything from start to finish, including the cutover, was seamless. Dare I say it felt more BAU than a major change project!
2. Their culture; what a team! Down to earth, no egos, happy to get their hands dirty, able to cope with the many questions from our info sec and data teams, happy to stick with our recommended technology platform (even when they had a different solution in place for other clients). The flexibility shown was appreciated throughout.
3. The investment from their senior leadership team; the CEO (Matt), plus many others across their leadership team have played key roles in almost every meeting.
4. The ‘value add’; we have asked them for their support in many ways outside of the contract we agreed with them, from market insights to permanent recruitment support, and each time they have risen to the challenge and have wanted to help.”
Get in touch
To discuss anything above in more detail, please reach out to one of our team to discuss how we can support you.
