Two years on: building something bigger than a brand

Two years back with Talentia Group feels like a pretty good reason to come up for air and look at what we’ve been building.

When I returned to the group, there was a clear opportunity to develop Magnetic from the ground up and broaden the recruitment and resource solutions we could offer our clients.

OneStaff already had strong foundations, long-standing client relationships and an established reputation across trades, operations and contingent workforce solutions.

The opportunity with Magnetic was to build alongside that strength.

Not to replace what OneStaff does, or create another recruitment business operating separately, but to develop deeper expertise across technical, professional and specialist recruitment and give our clients access to a much broader solution.

Two years on, that partnership is probably the part I’m most pleased about.

Two brands. One team.

OneStaff and Magnetic are different brands for good reason. They operate in different parts of the market and bring different networks, experience and areas of specialisation.
But our clients don’t necessarily think about their recruitment needs in those same categories.

A major project might require critical trades and operational people at scale while simultaneously needing engineers, project professionals and specialist technical contractors. A long-standing labour hire client might suddenly need to find a highly specialised permanent employee. Another client might need support finding a senior leader.

The requirement may change. The client relationship doesn’t need to.

Increasingly, our job is to bring the right expertise from across OneStaff and Magnetic around whatever that requirement happens to be.

That is what Two Brands | One Team means in practice.

When the model works.

One of the best examples has come through our OneStaff colleagues in Wellington.

The team had developed a relationship with an innovative business operating in a specialist area of RF engineering. As that relationship developed, a number of highly technical positions emerged that required specialist search capability.

Rather than trying to recruit outside their area of expertise, the OneStaff team brought Magnetic into the relationship.

Magnetic took on the specialist search and advertising process while working alongside our OneStaff colleagues to make the experience seamless for the client.

The result was a successful first round of search and advertising that identified the specialist hardware engineering capability the business had been looking for, after some of the positions had remained vacant from the client’s end for almost 12 months.

For me, that example captures what we have been trying to build.

It wasn’t about worrying which brand “owned” the client or the vacancy. It was about recognising that the requirement had changed and bringing in the right people, networks and recruitment approach to solve it.

That’s where the partnership becomes real.

Building deeper technical capability.

Our offering has also continued to evolve.

Magnetic started with a strong focus on permanent recruitment, but we’ve since developed our specialist contractor offering and are now providing technical contractors into major projects across Australia and New Zealand.

Combined with OneStaff’s ability to provide the critical trades these projects require, it gives us the ability to support projects across multiple disciplines and at different stages of delivery.

Today we’re genuinely recruiting across multidisciplinary environments spanning infrastructure, energy and industrial markets, supporting major projects and businesses across these sectors.

That can mean trades and operations through OneStaff, technical and professional recruitment through Magnetic, specialist contractors, permanent appointments or senior-level search.

The aim isn’t to try to make everything fit one recruitment model. It’s to understand what the client actually needs and bring the right workforce and resource solution around it.

From one person to a national team.

There is another milestone that probably says as much about the last two years as anything else.

What started with one person focused on developing this capability has now grown into a team of 10 across the country.

The number itself is less important than what sits behind it.

We’re seeing clients working across both Magnetic and OneStaff, and our teams collaborating across brands, regions and disciplines to solve requirements that wouldn’t always have sat naturally within a traditional labour hire or permanent recruitment model.

That creates a very different conversation with our clients.

We’re no longer limited to talking about the vacancy they have today. We can understand the broader workforce challenges they’re facing and determine where the expertise and resources across the group can genuinely help.

Still building.

There’s plenty we’re proud of after two years, but we’re certainly not finished.

The next phase is about continuing to deepen our specialist expertise, particularly across infrastructure, energy and industrial markets, while strengthening the connections between the people, clients and expertise sitting across OneStaff and Magnetic.

For me, that’s the bigger opportunity.

Magnetic has developed significantly over the last two years, but the most important outcome isn’t what Magnetic has become in isolation.

It’s what we’ve created alongside OneStaff.

Two strong brands. One team. Broader workforce and resource solutions.

And plenty more to build.