From Ad-Hoc Staffing to Strategic Partner for Tesco PLC

The Challenge

As one of the UK’s largest grocery retailers, Tesco needed an agile recruitment partner who could flexibly adapt to their needs and meet a wide range of recruitment requirements.

Adecco has been supporting Tesco in the recruitment of temporary employees since 2010. In 2014, we entered into a Managed Service Provider relationship to enable us to better support their strategic priorities. As part of this service, there was a requirement to:

A high volume of diverse roles was required – including engineers, warehouse workers, and managerial staff – with many vacancies requiring hard-to-find engineering expertise. With a pronounced STEM skills gap in the UK market, the client needed a specialist recruitment solution to help fill these niche roles and get the plant ready for production. The project is expected to require roughly 300 jobs in total as the facility continues to scale up.

From software solutions and attraction campaigns to career transition and coaching, Tesco needed a true strategic partner with the breadth and depth of services to support them through a wide range of business challenges.

Our Solution

We then designed a high-volume recruitment campaign to reach and engage the right candidates across multiple phases, developed using our local knowledge of candidate pools, skills, and competitors. Our dedicated Account Director oversaw the campaign, supported by experts in our national delivery centre, the local Adecco Peterborough team, and specialist recruiters across the company.

As most vacancies were niche roles with precise skill requirements, we knew the number of candidates with the exact skillset would be minimal – so the team focused on identifying candidates with transferable skills in similar industries and professions. With the facility under construction, we also arranged 10-week off-site training to meet the necessary onboarding requirements and put individuals in the best position to excel in their new roles.

Speaking about the strategic partnership, Catherine Peach, Talent Acquisition Manager at Crown Holdings said, “Adecco have collaborated with our teams effectively and seamlessly to promote our employer brand, attract and assess good quality candidates for the volume required, and coordinate the entire selection process. The hard work put in by the teams at Adecco allowed us to hire on time and in full at each stage of the project, and we were thrilled with the results. We would recommend them to any business.”