Airbus Supplier Finds Specialist Engineers Through ATA Selection
May 27 2009 - Specialist recruitment firm ATA Selection has helped to get the production of parts off the ground for the world's largest passenger plane.
When one of the Airbus A380 suppliers needed to take on extra highly-skilled staff, ATA Selection managed to find them key candidates very quickly.
SPS Aerostructures makes the integral parts of the sophisticated wing tips which enable the large "super-jumbo" to fit a normal runway.
The Nottinghamshire-based firm makes wing parts for a range of other civilian and military aircraft and employs more than 650 people on two sites around 10 miles apart.
The A380's near-vertical wing tips - which mimic an eagle's wings - are so cleverly designed they were recently highlighted on the BBC television series Richard Hammond's Engineering Connections.
Without these wing tips, and the extra lift they give, the A380's wings would have to be manufactured much wider and would be too large for commercial airports.
When working on the Airbus A380 contract, SPS Aerostructures found it needed to boost its CAD-CAM department by doubling the number of experienced Computerised Numerical Control programmers it employed.
After failing to find suitable candidates through the firm's usual channels, Engineering Manager Peter Steffen turned to ATA Selection's Leicester branch, which was swiftly able to supply programmers with the right engineering background.
After his initial discussion with Chris Deverson, Contract Engineering Consultant at ATA Selection, Mr Steffen was surprised to receive a return call within an hour offering him three suitably-qualified candidates straightaway.
Mr Steffen said: "It is not usually a problem finding candidates - but it is a problem finding candidates with the right experience.
"Plenty of candidates may appear on paper to have experience of a particular software system used in CNC programming, but often it turns out they have used it just for design, not for manufacturing.
"ATA Selection was quite refreshing: they did not waste our time. They do seem to come up with good quality candidates quickly.
"The people they put forward were qualified to do the jobs we needed to fill. That is why, if I needed extra staff in the future, ATA Selection would be the first people I would phone."
ATA Selection places great emphasis on using the expertise of its recruitment consultants in interviewing to identify and fully understand the sometimes rare skills sets which clients are seeking. They take time to talk to clients and often visit their workplace to evaluate precisely what a client's requirements are for a particular vacancy. This, coupled with their extensive knowledge of the local market place and expertise in resourcing, enables them to swiftly identify suitable candidates for clients to interview.
Their recruitment consultants also take great care to draw out a candidate's abilities, aspirations and motivations by in-depth face-to-face interviewing, thus ensuring a candidate will fit well into a company's culture and that there is a good match between a client's and a candidate's expectations, leading to a successful placement.
In SPS Aerostructure's case, ATA Selection was able to pre-select candidates with the right engineering background and experience to fit into the expanding aeronautics company, which supplies both civilian and military aircraft manufacturers.
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