How we can work with you

Our philosophy is simple: build recruitment solutions that meet our clients’ needs.

Solutions tailored to your specific requirements, with flexibility in mind. We support you to hire and retain the best talent, and scale up or down when you need us to. We build strong partnerships to act as an extension of our clients’ businesses, creating seamless, inclusive processes across the recruitment cycle.

Whether this has been for a one-off recruitment need for that critical, immediate hire, or in the development of a wider employee attraction program for multiple permanent or interim hires, we can support your wide range of recruitment needs to help you get to your goals faster.

How we can recruit for you

Exclusive recruitment

Our most popular way of working with the sectors. Our exclusivity model allows us to source candidates from a wide talent pool – including a dedicated, deep search for those passive candidates not actively looking for a new role at the time. This method has an incredibly high success rate and comes at a low cost that is only paid on the successful placement of the right candidate with you.

Retained recruitment

Our retained model, which includes a minimal upfront engagement fee and has an incredibly high fill rate, allows us to think outside the box for you. Working with you to identify the most suitable candidates for your positions, this includes direct and discrete approaches to these high-potential candidates. This more consultative approach provides a market overview and enhances the diversity of your candidate pool.

Contingent recruitment

Our contingent approach supports you when you need it most, when you have a vacancy to fill now. This method can be deployed quickly, and you will only pay if we are successful in placing the right candidate with you.

A recruitment partnership

Through a Partnership agreement, we can create a customised package that suits your requirements. This model allows us to work as a true partner with your organisation when you have multiple vacancies, whether they’re across your whole business, a single department, or various locations. This is a cost-effective recruitment method that includes everything above plus more. Your dedicated specialist Cobalt team will not only find the best possible candidates for your vacancies but also partner with you throughout the full recruitment lifecycle with our offering of consultative services below.

Our consultancy services

Our 23+ years of working with the sectors has given us real insight into what clients want to know when they’re trying to attract employees, and what candidates want to see. We use this knowledge to offer our clients more than ‘just’ recruitment services. We’re proud to be an extension of their talent attraction strategy encompassing everything from research through to market mapping and branding, so to be able to help our clients stand out to the best talent in a competitive market.

Helping you build your knowledge

Salary Surveys

We regularly produce industry-wide salary surveys, and can produce more bespoke surveys for a specific role, location or seniority. We can also create bespoke reports that include package details received across different roles.

Market Mapping

Market maps involve ur in-house research team creating bespoke competitor/market maps to support resource planning and/or talent pooling. We can tailor these to your speciﬁc needs.

Strategic Hiring Plans

Here, we work with you to develop a detailed roadmap of how you will identify and source the best talent. Our experience of working with a wide range of clients across the built environment since 2001 helps us to set timelines, budgets, and agree stakeholders and processes for each role, as well as look at internal mobility and succession planning options.

Helping you attract better employees

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Workshops

Wherever you are on your DE&I journey, we can develop a bespoke DE&I strategy - built together - that will support you in hiring a workforce that better represents society and elevates the potential of your people. See more about our DE&I work and services here.

Enhanced Employer Branding

Elevate your brand above the rest. We can help bring out what makes your company special to prospective applicants, creating your Employee Value Proposition (EVP), and promoting it through an attraction campaign so you can hire the best talent out there.

Helping you hire the right person

Learning and Development

Tailored to your speciﬁc needs, our training supports hiring managers in understanding the end-to-end resourcing process and the role they and their talent acquisition/HR teams need to play in it.

Skills-based Interviews.

Our deep sector knowledge and experience recruiting for these specialist roles in the built environment means that we know how to equip clients to hold interviews that fully assess candidates’ skills, creating a level playing ﬁeld to reduce bias in the hiring process at the same time.

Candidate Assessment

We can provide psychometric testing and personality proﬁling, which provides you with valuable insights into the ability and motivations of your candidates relative to the culture you've created and want to see.

Assessment Centres

If you require a number of similar hires over a short period of time, such as graduates or onsite staff for a range of new developments, we can source candidates and run assessment centres on your behalf.