IT recruitment services help large Canadian airline scale their hiring

Exceeding expectations with enterprise-wide, top talent solutions

Client

This large Canadian airline has over 4,500 employees. To address the fluctuating travel industry, they were in need of additional contract staff to deliver on all initiatives.

Challenge

Our client required a cost-effective recruitment strategy for the provision of IT professional services. Given their size and the changes in the airline industry, the strategy would need to be scalable and offer significant cost savings. This would be a high visibility optimisation with digitization and integration initiatives included.

Solution

S.i. Systems had been working with this airline since 2002 through several small, formalized agreements. A competitive RFP process in 2013 ended with S.i. Systems being selected as a primary vendor for Contract Staffing. The objective was to support the initiation, planning, development, management and successful delivery of internal IT initiatives.

To reach the airlines’ goal, S.i. Systems re-negotiated our margins in our MSA, providing the client with many value-added services throughout our business relationship. As well as providing hands-on account management, for example, S.i. Systems provides market rate analyses and pricing proposals to help ensure they are realizing the best value with their staffing partners.

In weekly meetings with hiring managers, our account team was onsite to ensure that all services were being delivered as promised, and that any contractor concerns were resolved in an efficient and effective manner. In addition, during the on-going COVID-19 crisis, we have worked in partnership with our client to develop best practices regarding rate reductions as well as unfortunate but necessary contract terminations.

During our 19+ years of working with this large Canadian airline, we have placed many resources to support their high-visibility digital retail and e-commerce optimization projects. Some of these have included the digitization of flight, vacation (including hotel), and in-flight product purchases to integrated web-based platforms.

We provided Contract Staffing, Payrolling (Flo-Thru™) and Direct Hire services. Since being named a primary vendor in 2013 we have also obtained exclusivity for the first 5 business days on all new roles (contracts) with our client, due to our strong business relationship. This has resulted in deployment of more than 480 unique resources in specialties like:

Outcomes

S.i. Systems has had a long and successful relationship with this client. We are a preferred vendor, and for the last several years, we have become the exclusive vendor for staffing all new retail IT roles to support scalable, high availability solutions.

Of the 500+ unique resources we have placed, over 61% have renewal contracts. We currently have resources on assignment, and we look forward to supporting the reopening of routes and resource needs as transportation markets recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Highlights of Relationship:

Implemented and standardized processes for onboarding consultant resources and receiving POs
With procurement, devised options to save money across the board
Worked closely with the client’s procurement team to secure resourcing across the organization