How KEO Scaled Hiring by 40% and Boosted Applications by 46%


Headquarters:
UAE
Industry:
Architecture & engineering consultancy
Founded:
1964
ICIMS customer since:
2015
Company size:
2,500+
ICIMS products:
Applicant Tracking System
Career Sites
Offer Management
Employee Onboarding
AI Talent Explorer
KEO International Consultants logo

KEO International Consultants is a leading civil engineering and architecture consultancy operating across 15 offices in 13 countries spanning Europe, the Middle East and Asia, with more than 2,500 professionals delivering complex, large-scale projects worldwide. Because KEO’s work is predominantly project-based, the majority of its talent is hired on two-to-three-year contracts, making high-volume, high-velocity recruiting a permanent operational reality.

Growing quickly, KEO’s need for talent surged by 40%. In just one year, the company added 1,000 new people. Rather than increase recruiter headcount, they scaled intelligence, partnering with ICIMS to automate, optimize and modernize every stage of the recruiting lifecycle.

40%

Increase in hiring volume managed with the same size of TA team

46%

Increase in applications YTD after career site redesign

~1,000

People hired in one year

The challenge

A 40% year-over-year jump in open positions is a stress test for any talent acquisition function. For KEO, it meant absorbing a dramatically higher volume of requisitions across a globally distributed team, without adding recruiters, without slowing time to hire and without sacrificing the quality of specialist talent their projects demand.

At the same time, KEO identified opportunities to modernize other parts of the hiring process: their career site was dated and misaligned with the broader KEO brand experience, contract issuance was manual and email-dependent, and reporting to key stakeholders was ad hoc and time-consuming.

KEO employees collaborate around a blueprint

Utilizing ICIMS AI Talent Explorer, we were able to manage this huge increase in our workload, with the same size TA team, and it has given us the ability to identify suitable Tier 1 candidates in a much more timely manner.

Niall Hughes

Director of Talent Acquisition, KEO International Consultants

KEO employee works at a standing desk

The solution

KEO worked closely with ICIMS across four key initiatives to transform their talent acquisition operation, including:

  • Rebuilding their career site to drive candidate volume, in partnership with the ICIMS team
  • Deploying AI to manage workload growth, including ICIMS Talent Explorer for candidate matching and shortlisting
  • Automating contract issuance via ICIMS Offer Management and DocuSign integration
  • Building structured, custom stakeholder reporting dashboards to provide real-time visibility, including 90 Day Time to Hire, Recruiter Activity, Candidate Pending Request and Reference Verification reports

The impact

KEO’s talent acquisition team now operates with the efficiency of a function twice its size. Recruiters spend less time manually shortlisting and more time engaging the specialist talent that drives project success. Stakeholders receive accurate, timely workforce data. Candidates experience a faster, more professional hiring journey from the moment they find KEO’s career site to the moment they sign their contract.

And with a scalable, AI-powered infrastructure in place, KEO is positioned to absorb future volume growth without expanding the TA team.

KEO employees working at their desks

Hiring close to 1,000 people a year, across 13 countries, with the same team, is only possible because we have the right technology behind us. ICIMS makes that possible.

Niall Hughes

Director of Talent Acquisition, KEO International Consultants

iCIMS customer story image

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