An emerging technology demands a strategic engineering partnership

The challenge: emerging business

The company had recently made significant progress in developing solid-state LiDAR sensors. This advancement enabled it to make sensors that are more compact than their traditional predecessors, at a reduced cost—with less risk for malfunction, since they also contain fewer moving parts. The automotive industry soon made plans to build vehicles with these new sensors at the front, rear, and on all four corners. All great news, but the client’s business now needed a workforce supplier with the capacity to quickly scale its recruiting operations and keep pace with the rapid expansion.

The company had already grown from 50 to more than 1,000 employees in just the past two years. The client was previously using smaller, local agencies—but given this new growth, they were struggling to hire in the volumes needed. As an emerging technology, the exact skills and experience required for many technical and engineering roles were not readily available, even in a tech-heavy environment like Silicon Valley. Ultimately, the client decided to open a new manufacturing facility in nearby San Jose. HR leaders needed to hire 200 highly technical specialists in just two months. And beyond the more straightforward staffing services that its smaller agencies could provide, the client needed more streamlined communication and account management to better coordinate all of its sourcing and hiring activity.

The result: flexible partnership

Some of the key values that Kelly provides include the flexibility to scale capacity for larger, high-volume hiring projects. The local team offers collaboration, insight, and the reliable coordination of all these activities into a coherent, measurable program. The business also benefitted from the Kelly team’s scope of solutions—able to pivot from acting as a single supplier, to providing on-site functionality, to establishing a more holistic partnership in a very short time. Ultimately, they helped to enable the launch of critical new production facility for the client: on time and on budget.

Kelly filled 60 engineering and technical positions in its first year—which proved critical to launching the client’s new San Jose production facility on time and honoring its new business contracts. The team has since scaled back to 26 engineering employees on assignment, while many technicians have been converted to full-time employees. Meanwhile, Kelly improved on the previous suppliers’ measurement of submittals to orders filled—from a ratio of 6:1 to 2.67:1-twice as efficient and an indicator of quality

The client has recently opened up opportunities for direct hire, with Kelly making nine placements in the first year. Kelly is now the client’s sole supplier for engineering talent, with activity across 14 different client managers and a variety of product lifecycle or skill areas. The client has converted 173 Kelly employees to full-time hires within the last year alone, saving time and money. Current Kelly headcount averages about 140 total employees over all areas.

While the bulk of engineering staffing is still needed for laser alignment technicians, the Kelly team has also recently placed: