Remote Webinar Mar 2024
Winning Secrets: How Connexus Global’s absolute expertise in specific disciplines helps retain people and knowledge

Winning Secrets: How Connexus Global’s absolute expertise in specific disciplines helps retain people and knowledge

As an industry newcomer with fewer than 50 employees on its rolls, Connexus Global prides itself for its strength in value chain recruitment. This was proven as the organisation was crowned the bronze winner for the Best New Recruitment Firm category at the Asia Recruitment Awards 2020, Singapore

Upon demonstrating quantifiable results and delivering excellence to clients, Connexus Global’s Managing Director, Alex Lee and Director, James Egremont open up about their recruitment strategy, challenges, ROI measurement and key USPs to Priya Veeriah.

Q What is your organisation’s recruitment strategy, and how has it evolved in recent times?  

Connexus Global is built on the strength of our people, the culture of each office, despite being in multiple locationsand having a multicultural team of people.We work cohesively and have been structured in a way that everyone is collaborating and sharing. 

To achieve these outcomes in what’s usually a very competitive, cutthroat environment, we have invested in psychometric testing to ensure everyone in the company lives by the same values: inspiration, relationships, empathy, and expertise. 

This has been instrumental to the foundation in which we operate. It allows people to come to work feeling inspired by the people around them. We also are not the traditional recruitment and search firm.

We believe everyone should feel safe in the environment in which they work in and do not foster a ‘fear’ culture. In fact, if people have a bad month or quarter, we show empathy and invest our time, money and resources to enable them to become absolute experts in specific disciplines which results in longer-term success. This has proven to be very successful for us based on our extremely low attrition rate whilst remaining consistently profitable as a group.

Q No execution is free from unexpected hurdles. In what shape or form did you experience challenges, and how did you overcome them?  

The biggest challenges we faced was picking up good quality assignments from new and existing clients. As a new business, developing key clients takes time to show results. Hence, we had to hustle harder than ever before while remaining true to our value chain proposition to avoid sending a conflicting message to the market. 

We could have easily picked up commercial mandates such as finance, legal, IT and HR but we decided to turn this business away to focus solely on what our proposition to the market is: Being the leader in value chain recruitment, i.e.commodity trading, procurement, innovation, operations, marketing, and supply chain. 

By sticking to our expertise, despite at times needing to bolster our pipeline, we gained the respect from clients, and our delivery was faster with better quality. Moreover, our candidate networks blew up in a very short space of time. This then spiralled into multiple trusted partnerships and repeat business. We have now been engaged in multiple, regional exclusive PSLs with some of the world's most renowned companies for all positions that work along the global value chain. 

Q On to the most important part – results! How did you measure the ROI or milestones of this initiative, and what are you most proud of? 

We strive to be absolute experts for recruiting into the industries and functions that we operate in. We can only do this by retaining people and knowledge. We have one of the lowest attrition rates in the recruitment industry and our clients keep coming back to us with more work because of the high levels of service they receive. We invest in our people and as a result are valued by our clients.

Q What is one way your organisation stands out from others when it comes to attracting talent in the competitive landscape for your clients?  

By staying true to our industry and functional approach, at the very beginning, we built a comprehensive research facility in Bangkok which is functionally and industry-specific. We have local consultants generating candidates across the globe each working in a specific discipline, operating around strict metrics, and building networks across the value chain. This enables us to beat our competition and deliver high-quality candidates with precision and speed every time. 

Photo / Provided - Connexus Global’s Managing Director, Alex Lee

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