BH Associates® Case Study
Administrative Coordinator Statement of Work Project
Challenge
Our client, a major American airline headquartered at the Willis Tower in Chicago, Illinois, needed contract staff to handle administrative business functions. Our client’s pilot scheduling department was especially busy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The department had to find pilots to cover flights if pilots got sick, and they also had to make sure pilots were off for eight hours to meet aviation regulations. This made scheduling very challenging. The scheduling department was understaffed and needed its most skilled workers to focus on scheduling and not administrative duties. Therefore, our client engaged Beacon Hill Associates to quickly hire contract staff to manage the department’s administrative functions and to ultimately pull other employees to focus on scheduling.
Our client didn’t want to go through the vendor management process and had never used contractors before, but they were determined to keep their business functioning efficiently. Therefore, they engaged us through a statement of work (SOW) project. The client initially needed ten administrative coordinators. However, when we started filling the positions so quickly, the client realized that they only needed four administrative staff members. Our rapid turnaround time for reviewing and signing the agreement, along with filling the jobs before the client was ready with computers, resulted in the client pushing our candidates’ start date out several weeks. Although the start date was delayed a few weeks, we kept all the candidates engaged so no one left throughout the hiring process.
Solution
Our Chicago contract recruiting team’s success on this project can be attributed to our sense of urgency. Our team dropped everything and immediately started making calls to find qualified candidates. We searched for candidates in previous roles with companies where their positions required a high level of attention to detail and where things could change at a moment’s notice. We looked for candidates who worked in an environment where they had to be resourceful. We used computer testing to ensure they had basic computer skills, and we confirmed that candidates would be available for the first or second shift. Finally, we completed reference checks on all candidates.
The Results
Overall, the four contract workers we placed stayed for the duration of the project. All four of them received excellent feedback from the client. One of our candidates was even asked to stay on as a permanent employee, and he accepted the offer. We continue to work with this client and have recently formalized our role as an ongoing staffing provider. Not only do we fill administrative roles, but we also fill IT positions through our Beacon Hill Technologies division. This client came to us with very little experience using staffing firms and never having used contract employees before, and we walked them through the process from start to finish regarding how to effectively engage with a staffing firm. We were able to use our project management skills behind the scenes to achieve our client’s contract staffing goals.
