Oval treats each recruitment assignment as an opportunity to raise an organisation to a higher level. We see each new staff member as an investment. A good candidate will see themselves that way too. If you want to attract the best candidate to join your organisation and stay with you, you will need to make the right investment. It’s not just a matter of money and processes, but also of time and commitment. The right candidate will only be secured if both the client and the candidate can see the bigger picture – and agree on their place within it.

Facts & figures:
• 80% of the search assignments come from the Aerospace & Defense branch
• 65% of the vacancies are Business Development & Sales
• 92% of the candidates still work at the same employer after 3 years

Each organisation has a ‘dominant culture’ that is positioned in the labour market via employer branding and other PR & communication platforms. Logically, this doesn’t always provide a full reflection of reality. An organisational culture consists of many subcultures, which themselves can be broken down into different team cultures. A team culture may actually differ quite substantially from what the organisational culture is perceived to be.

The best candidate for you will be smart, up to speed on the latest developments and ready to search for information from other sources in order to gain a better understanding of what is really happening in your organisation. The more closely they feel that they match their future team, the better. There’s a good reason why candidates recruited via ‘employee referrals’ often last longer and perform better than those who respond directly to advertised vacancies. A lack of understanding of subcultures and team dynamics is the main reason for mismatches. Every mismatch is a failed investment that will have an impact on the performance of your organisation.

This is not a new insight. The basis for our vision and our comprehensive approach has already been applied successfully by many others before us. Take Johan Cruijff, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan and Steven Covey, for example. There can be no better frame of reference to demonstrate the success of that vision. And our track record, which we have been developing with passion and drive since 2010, is one that we are rightly proud of.

Facts & figures:
• 80% of the assignments come from the Aerospace & Defense branch
• 12% of the assignments come from the Shipbuilding branch
• 5% of the assignments come from the Logistics & Transportation branch
• 3% from other industries

You achieve more together than you do alone – that applies to us, just like it applies to any other organisation. That’s why we offer our clients a carefully comprised Oval team that has exactly the right team dynamic.

The client’s fixed recruitment team will always consist of four experienced members: a profiler/consultant, a headhunter/recruiter and an integrator/coach. Frank Osinga has ultimate responsibility for profiling and will have contact with the client. Marcel Bekema has ultimate responsibility for matching and for contact with the candidate. Ellen Peters and Deirdre van der Valk ensure that a candidate integrates smoothly into the team that they will be joining. All communication conducted in the course of the process will be genuine and authentic. And that’s crucial for ensuring the optimum result.

The Oval team will give their all to ensure top performance, which means attracting and securing the best candidate. The key is to understand the bigger picture. The profiler works with the client at the start of the process to discover the details of that bigger picture both for benefit of the client and for their ideal candidate. Only once all the pieces are on the board can you understand how best to move them; in this respect, making a recruitment investment is like playing a game of chess.

OVAL does not only build teams with its customers. We also do this with our own organization, with an inspiring focus on growth and added value for the market. We ourselves do not lend wisdom and have never been ready with learning. That is why we continually challenge ourselves, among other things, with our members of the Advisory Board. Appealing persons with many ‘flight hours’ in business and in life. And we are happy that these men provide us with solicited and unsolicited advice:

Choose the 11 best players and you will end up with 11 good individual players. But you won’t have the best team. By the best candidate, we don’t just mean the candidate who fulfils the relevant selection criteria in terms of their experience, expertise and education. Their personal qualities, energy and ambition also need to complement and strengthen the dynamic of the team that they will be joining. Each hiring manager wants a team to achieve even more once its new member has joined. Just like with any other investment, the real aim is not simply to recoup your initial stake, but to reap the profits. And this is something that we specialise in.

Facts & figures:
• 65% of the vacancies are Business Development & Sales
• 20% of vacancies are Operations & Engineering
• 10% of vacancies are Directors & Senior Management
• 5% of vacancies are C-level (CEO, COO, CFO)

Communicating with your ideal candidate is crucial. Through employer branding, interactive websites, social media and events, companies pull out all the stops these days to communicate with potential talent. However the best candidate will regard that information as PR and will want to dig deeper. A ‘theoretical test run’ would be desirable to complement all the interviews, brochures and information obtained via Google.

It’s impossible to identify team dynamics and subcultures accurately within your own organisation. It simply can’t be done. No employee is going to risk the exposure. Instead they will always be thinking of the risks to their own career path or even to their chances of retaining their job. That’s why the Oval recruitment team includes a specialist profiler/consultant. Our profilers know exactly how to ‘take the temperature’ of the team in which the vacancy exists. Profiling is conducted within the organisation and then in respect of the envisaged candidate.

Almost every job profile focuses on standards, leaving candidates with insufficient information about the bigger picture. But that information is what the best candidate will be looking for. That candidate wants to know exactly where they will end up. They will want a sense of the team dynamic in relation to the vacancy, and will want to know: “Will I flourish in this new environment? Or will I run into brick walls?” After all, the best candidate treats this as their own personal investment decision too.

Our profiler will draw on soft and hard information and, using a variety of different techniques, will draw up a job profile. This Oval job profile will provide a highly readable overview of the bigger picture, the hard requirements and the soft ones, the team dynamic and the dominant culture. The end product will read like a good book. Candidates often describe this type of profile as ‘authentic’, ‘honest’ and ‘a breath of fresh air’.
Once the client approves the profile, the Oval team’s headhunter/recruiter will get to work. A valuable added benefit of our written job profile is that it enhances employer branding in an authentic way.

The Oval team’s headhunter/recruiter will always conduct a proactive search and approach only those candidates who could be a potential match. We don’t advertise, because your best candidate will often be quite happy where they are and not actively checking vacancies or adverts on LinkedIn.
The best candidates will read Oval’s profile and immediately feel that it makes a deeper appeal to their values and ambitions. Only the best candidates will feel their passion stimulated in a way that encourages them to respond.

From the pool of many candidates who fulfil the hard requirements, we will select only those who will actually complement and strengthen your team. These candidates will then be admitted to our selection process. Besides interviews, CVs and personal statements, our procedure also includes a personality test. The profiler will further analyse the results of this test and see how they match the results of the organisational profiling. Once we are confident that we have the right match, we will present the candidate to you immediately.

Coaching during the first six months in a new position has been demonstrated to accelerate the integration of a new employee. Our comprehensive approach therefore includes three coaching sessions as standard during that period. This helps the candidate feel at home more quickly and achieve faster results. In this way, you could say that we are safeguarding the client’s investment. Our comprehensive approach eliminates the danger of a candidate turning in a suboptimal performance, frustrating the rest of the team or jumping ship prematurely. This is a powerful way to hedge against the risk of making the wrong investment. And that’s another reason why candidates placed by us come with a full 12-month guarantee.

Oval is no substitute for a recruitment structure within an organisation; instead we complement that structure by offering demonstrable added value. Our many years of experience have taught us that our approach can eliminate persistent problems within an organisation. Profiling supports strong HR departments in their interaction with the line, as well as providing HR and senior management with valuable insights regarding aspects of the dominant culture and team dynamic. Communication with the line and the response time from hiring managers will accelerate markedly. There will be greater knowledge and understanding of the recruitment process and a clearer picture of its purpose and requirements. Positive energy, commitment and engagement will develop within the operation. Commitment from the line is essential for ensuring that a recruitment investment decision can be taken effectively. All too often, there is an unjustified expectation that HR should do it all. But effective recruitment is and will remain a team effort.

Even if you have your own recruitment department, it makes sense to ask us to fill a couple of positions each year. The profiling that entails will deliver a treasure trove of management information. Using the information and insights gained from the profiling, your own recruitment team can boost its performance and start to operate on a higher level. A dynamic is by its nature something that changes, so once profiling has been done, that doesn’t mean your organisation is all set for the years ahead. To get the information you need, you have to do the research – and that applies to team dynamics and subcultures too.

Facts & figures:
• 92% of the candidates placed by OVAL still work for the same employer after 3 years
• 98% of the candidates offered by OVAL are invited for an initial interview
• 85% of the candidates offered by OVAL are invited for a follow-up interview
• On average, 4 to 6 candidates are offered per assignment
• 75% of the search assignments are obtained through candidates and clients

Oval Headhunting’s comprehensive approach costs no more than a standard approach and doesn’t take more time. However, it does use time more efficiently and effectively. And to get the top result we want, we ask the organisation for its commitment. After all, it will be making an important investment.

As is appropriate for any good and transparent investment, our invoicing policy is also geared towards our comprehensive approach and risk spreading. So we only work with hard deliverables and hard guarantees, and we invoice you for them accordingly. Clients know exactly what they will pay for and when.

Our invoices are therefore divided over three payment points:
– 1/3 of the fee is payable after definitive approval of the job profile written in the profiling phase;
– 1/3 of the fee is payable when the desired candidate is hired by the organisation;
– 1/3 of the fee is payable once the candidate has completed three months in their new job.

What we will be doing for the organisation will be crystal clear and payment will only be collected once a hard deliverable has been successfully achieved.

OVAL headhunting safeguards the continuity of teams and therefore of companies themselves. We are aware that the sectors we operate in have a certain impact on the Planet, and we want to do something in return. After all, a sustainable business partnership goes hand-in-hand with a sustainable environment. That’s why we have become associated with the foundation Trees for All.

This foundation contributes to a sustainable planet by planting trees in the Netherlands and thereby helping to offset CO2 emissions. So together we are investing in the future. For every candidate that we place, OVAL will plant a tree. This makes OVAL Headhunting the first recruitment agency whose operations are carbon-neutral.

For more information about Trees for All visit: www.treesforall.nl