The Problem
During this project, Acumen alongside a prominent development agency worked with the client, a platform/initiative aimed at providing blue collar job seekers decent employment opportunities, career advisory services, and short-term training in preparation for the job, all free of charge for the job seeker. Acumen had to address two goals during this assignment. The first goal was to help the client evaluate the historical performance of their program and its effectiveness in securing blue collar jobs and lowering turnover, in addition to helping them determine their key strengths, competitive advantages, niches sectors and recommended portfolio of services.
The second goal was to help the company carry its mission forward, and design a business model for the initiative, for them to create a profitable service portfolio to help make the company’s business model more sustainable over the long term.
The Approach
This project was carried out over two phases. During the first phase, the consulting team conducted an in-depth labor- retention study to measure the sustainability of the client’s placements and average job retention rates of those employed by the client. This exercise consisted of analyzing data to discern the key trends and the main characteristics of successful hires and comparing the turnover rates of the client for specific sectors/job titles to the turnover rates for those sectors/job titles in the rest of the market. The team then conducted in depth interviews with the client’s beneficiaries (i.e. company’s looking for job seekers) to gain more insights on aspects such as the company’s turnover rates, the jobs with the highest and lowest turnover at their companies, common reasons for resignations at their companies, and the difference between market placements and NEP placements in terms of quality and continuity. Finally, sustainability was also measured by benchmarking their performance to that of the other leading blue-collar recruitment platform in the market.
The second phase of the project related to studying the service portfolios and business models of other similar blue-collar platforms in developed and developing international markets. Subsequently, a variety of possible business models were designed and presented to help the client discover the possible income generating streams that they can adopt in the future in order to preserve the sustainability of their platform.
