How one of the world's largest professional services firms filled 50 roles in six months, in seven languages

The Client — and Why This Mandate Is Unusual

Our client is one of the largest professional services organisations on the planet, employing hundreds of thousands of people globally. It also operates one of the most sophisticated internal talent acquisition functions in existence — recruitment at a scale and level of industrialisation that few organisations anywhere can match.

That context is the most interesting part of this case study.

When an organisation with that much internal recruiting capability engages an external partner, it is not because it lacks recruiters. It is because a specific combination of volume, language complexity and timeline exceeds what even a world-class internal function can absorb without compromising something. Being selected for that work is a meaningful form of validation — and it sets a correspondingly high bar for delivery.

The Challenge: Breadth, Languages and a Client Who Knows Exactly How Recruitment Works

Seven languages. German, Hungarian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, French and Italian — spread across finance and support functions. Hungarian and Dutch in particular are scarce in the Romanian market; Italian and Spanish are contested; German is the single most competitively fought language in the entire business services sector.

Eight distinct functional areas. Executive-level recruitment, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, General Ledger, Level 1 Support, HR Analyst, Procurement and Insurance. Each has its own talent market, its own assessment logic and its own competitive dynamics. Insurance and procurement profiles in particular sit in narrow specialist pools.

An executive layer alongside volume hiring. The mandate spanned from senior appointments down to specialist individual contributors — two fundamentally different recruitment disciplines running under one programme and one deadline.

A client who evaluates rigorously. Working for an organisation that recruits professionally at industrial scale means every process detail is visible and assessed. There is no benefit of the doubt on candidate quality, pipeline management or communication discipline.

Six months for all of it.

Our Approach

Segmentation before execution. We split the mandate into distinct programmes — executive search, finance operations, multilingual support, and specialist functions including HR, procurement and insurance — each with its own strategy, rather than managing fifty requisitions as a single queue.

Language strategy differentiated by scarcity. Hungarian and Dutch were approached through community-based sourcing and referral networks, where the addressable population is too small for reach-based methods. German, French, Italian and Spanish required competitive positioning and speed, because the candidates were being approached by multiple employers simultaneously.

Executive roles run as search, not as volume. Senior appointments were handled through a dedicated search process with the assessment depth they require — never absorbed into the throughput of the wider programme.

Process discipline matched to the audience. For a client of this sophistication, we ran the engagement with the transparency they would apply internally: clear pipeline visibility, structured feedback and predictable communication, so the partnership operated as an extension of their own function rather than as an external supplier.

The Delivery

50 roles closed in 6 months, spanning eight functional areas and seven languages.

Executive and specialist hiring delivered together, without the leadership appointments being compressed to protect volume targets or the volume roles slipping to protect the leadership search.

The scarce languages covered — including Hungarian and Dutch, the two profiles most likely to stall a multilingual programme of this size.

Specialist functions staffed alongside the higher-volume finance and support towers, including procurement and insurance roles drawn from narrow talent pools.

The Long View

Our client remains one of the largest and most influential professional services organisations in the world, and its Romanian operations form part of a business services sector that has become one of Europe's most significant — a sector built on exactly the combination of multilingual capability, finance expertise and technology skills that this mandate required.

Key Takeaways

• Strong internal recruitment functions still need specialist partners. Not because they lack capability, but because spikes in volume, language complexity and timeline exceed any fixed internal capacity. That is precisely when an external partner earns its place.
• Seven languages is seven markets. Scarce languages need community sourcing; contested languages need speed and positioning. Applying one method to both fails on one side or the other.
• Never blend executive search into volume delivery. They require different processes, and compressing one into the other damages both.
• Sophisticated clients are the best clients. They evaluate rigorously, give precise feedback and hold a high standard — and delivering for them is the clearest proof of capability a recruitment partner can offer.