Andrew Parkin was 19 years old when he joined the Royal Navy. Twenty-two years on, having reached the level of warrant officer with the navy’s communication branch, he was keen to pursue a new direction.

“I had the option of a further 10 years with the navy,” says Parkin, 41, “but I had always known that I would want to have a second career. I felt it would be easier to start that at the age of 41 rather than 51." Quite how easy it would be to embark on a new path Parkin hadn’t realised. But within seven days of leaving the navy and sending his CV to ElanRTO, a recruitment company recommended by a friend, he had an offer to start work as a hardware design project leader at the systems division of GE Aviation (formerly Smiths Aerospace) on a salary of about £38,000 in Bishop’s Cleeve, Cheltenham.

GE Aviation systems division, which designs and produces digital, electronic and mechanical systems for aircraft, outsourced recruitment to ElanRTO just over a year ago: the agency screens candidates for any vacancy in the division’s 2,000-strong workforce and focuses particularly on speed of hiring — as Parkin discovered. Four days after he posted his CV, a recruitment consultant from ElanRTO phoned him to gather more details, such as his aspirations and salary requirements. The next day a job spec was sent to him for a position. Two days later he was being interviewed by systems division staff and 24 hours after that an offer was made.

The speed of the process astonished Parkin, now in his fourth week with the company. “I was canoeing near Plymouth when I got the phone call offering me the job,” he says. “It took me by surprise.”

Dugald McIntosh, delivery manager for ElanRTO, says the agency, which has eight staff working on the GE account, has already placed 250 people within the aviation division.

“That could be in any role,” says McIntosh. “Our key drivers generally are to reduce the time taken to hire each person by 30%, to reduce the cost of each hire by 25% and to increase the recruitment of permanent candidates by 40%.” The systems division of GE Aviation Systems, he explains, like many companies seeking engineers, “were having problems with their permanent recruitment. The company is working in a very competitive marketplace for talent, looking for hardware, software, systems engineers — when everybody is looking for engineers. So rather than making recruitment long and complex, we focused on making it very fast”.

The last stage of the recruitment process was cut down to a single interview, replacing the four interview stages that were previously deployed. Personality and technical skill are now both assessed by a systems division manager at this interview.

Parkin says he welcomed the agency’s input: “What I was keen to do was enlist with a professional agency. I knew I could not open the doors I wanted opened on my own. Applying cold to companies is very difficult if you do not have an intermediary articulating your case.”

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