Services

Strategic People Solutions

Your people are your most important asset. The people in your organisation will have the greatest impact on your business and ultimately determine its success or failure. Universe partner with Business Leaders, Human Resources, Talent Acquisition and work with private and public organisations to develop proactive people strategies aimed at identifying, attracting and retaining the best people.

Our consultants have expert knowledge across a broad range of sectors. This allows us to work with leaders to develop a deep, detailed understanding of your business strategy and potential workforce planning challenges. We utilise expert research methodologies garnered over decades of leading dedicated research roles within international search firms and large global enterprises.

We identify and engage with the best people in the market for your organisation. Coupled with our extensive networks, we build exhaustive targeted maps of the talent market and are always transparent with the comprehensive data we provide you. This is critical for effective talent pipelining, succession planning and executive search assignments, aimed at meeting your current and future hiring needs.

We are often engaged on highly confidential and sensitive projects to support restructuring, organisational development and workforce planning activities and we offer holistic strategic people solutions including:

• Employer Brand & Strategy
• Talent Mapping
• Talent Engagement
• Talent Pipelining
• End-to-End Executive Search
• Remuneration and Compensation Benchmarking
• Succession Planning
• Career Transition

Employer Brand & Strategy

We partner with you to communicate your brand and message to the market and help develop your employer brand strategy to ensure you effectively reach your target audience. We provide tailored employment brand and content solutions, channel recommendations and training programs to enhance awareness of your brand in the market. We convey a targeted message and ultimately attract the best people to your organisation.

Talent Mapping

Universe are experts in leading a confidential and discrete research and intelligence-gathering process. We identify, map out and assess prospective candidates who are most aligned to the brief for a new appointment. The detailed talent map is collated by our research experts using world-class in-depth research skills, coupled with our local and global networks. Our exhaustive approach to research is designed to uncover all relevant prospects in any sector, not just those with an easily accessible online footprint. This allows you access to potential targets otherwise unreachable by traditional strategic sourcing methods.

Talent Engagement

Following the talent mapping stage, Universe will discretely approach and engage with all mutually agreed targets holding confidential targeted conversations. The Talent Engagement stage will:

• Explore previous relevant experience and skills, assessing suitability and alignment to the role
• Provide details of current role, responsibilities, as well as information around remuneration, benefits, leave entitlement, mobility, notice period, timing for a move and working rights.
• Provide an assessment of leadership style, career motivations (short, medium and longer term), personal motivations, cultural fit to your organisation and interest in a potential move.
• Promote your business as an employer of choice
• Result in a longlist of fully qualified candidates who are interested in a specific role

Universe provide weekly progress updates, including a summary of prospects contacted, interested candidate interview notes, resumes as well as a final report including recommendations, observations and trends.

Talent Pipelining

Effective talent pipelining should result in increased awareness of your business, meet targets aligned to your business strategy and result in a greater number of hires for business-critical and nominated roles of interest.

Universe can build you a talent pipeline by identifying, engaging with and assessing target people with a particular skillset aligned to what your organisation may want to hire now and into the future.

Our strategic talent pipelining solution can overcome challenges where organisations have:

• Ongoing hiring needs for the same position or skillset
• High volumes required with high turnover
• Diversity targets to meet
• Business-critical roles with hard-to-find skillsets
• Encountered challenges with recruitment of a specific skillset or role
• Multiple vacancies across multiple geographies
• Expansion of specific planned projects
• New roles in the future that will require staffing

We partner with you to understand your workforce planning challenges and provide practical and strategic solutions. Building a strong talent pipeline provides key talent intelligence and data across nominated locations, functions and skills to be best positioned for attracting talent into your business in the future.

End-to-End Executive Search

We are experts in identifying, approaching, engaging and attracting top talent to your organisation and we provide complete end-to-end executive search services for senior level roles up to Board/Chair and C-level appointments. Universe always follow a robust and proven executive search process. We build a comprehensive map of the talent in your sector as well as identifying suitable prospects outside of your industry to provide you with a comprehensive market overview. We work with key stakeholders to mutually agree on the top talent to engage with, attracting target prospects to the business, assessing their suitability and culture fit and manage them through the interview process, reference checking and final appointment.

Remuneration & Compensation Benchmarking

Remuneration and compensation benchmarking provides a market overview of positions within your organisation in specific geographies to similar positions in the market and we compare any potential differences in salaries, benefits and leave entitlements. Using expert research methodology and our network, Universe capture large sets of accurate quantitative and qualitative data. This data provides key insights to help organisations benchmark salary, benefits and leave entitlements with the external market.

Succession Planning

Succession planning for business-critical roles helps mitigate risk and is an opportunity to strengthen your organisation in the future. Succession planning can also offer a chance to balance the diversity of your senior leadership team and organisation.

Universe can partner with you to support succession planning strategies or help develop a new strategy and succession plan to mitigate leadership risk. We are experienced in working on highly confidential succession planning assignments with large global organisations and our key data and market insights have informed boards and senior leaders on benchmarking and critical decision-making.

We present organisations with the top prospects in the market who are aligned in terms of experience, qualifications and remuneration and are ready to step into a business-critical role now or in the short term.  We also identify and recommend prospects who are rising stars on an upward career trajectory to keep track of for a potential move into a future leadership role.

Career Transition

As part of our holistic strategic people solutions offering, Universe provide professional outplacement services, working with impacted employees to support their career transition following organisational restructuring. Our outplacement consultants tailor the program for each organisation and all individuals impacted, managing the outplacement process. Our consultants provide:

• A personalised service
• Guidance on re-entering the job market
• Professional coaching
• Regular updates and support through the transition period

Competitor & Market Intelligence

Competitor and market intelligence is an important process designed to support your organisation’s leaders in strategic data-driven decision-making and involves the collection and analysis of all available competitor and market information from a variety of sources. Our confidential CI process defines, gathers, analyses and shares key intelligence and data with your organisation about competitors, customers, products and services and any aspect of the industry and external environment which will increase your competitiveness.

Specifically, Universe provide in-depth and comprehensive competitor and market data including:

• Competitor Organisational Charts, Team Structures & Analysis
• Competitor M&A Activity, Financial Reports, Recent News Articles & Media
• Salary Data including Benefits, Leave Entitlements & Benchmarking
• Current Industry Trends, Insights, Analysis & Forecast Growth
• Market Data including key competitors and size by revenue, employees
• Talent Intelligence, Profiles of Key People & Recent Moves

Our competitor intelligence solutions include up-to-date, reliable market data gained from comprehensive research using expert techniques to develop valuable competitor and market insight. We provide you with current data, trends and recommendations, clearly communicated and graphically represented for impactful, actionable insight to help drive your business goals and keep your organisation ahead of the competition.

Data Analytics & Insights

Data in key decision-making is imperative and we are committed to providing you with key metrics and critical data to help guide strategic business decisions aligned with your overall goals, initiatives and objectives. Our data analytics and insights enable data-driven decision-making to:

• Create new business opportunities
• Enter new markets
• Increase revenue
• Improve operations
• Benchmark against the competition
• Set diversity targets
• Identify and attract the best people
• Predict future trends
• Produce actionable insights

Data insights and analytics are a critical component included in all of our tailored projects to best inform your decision-making. Whether it be for succession planning, supporting your growth strategy, gaining competitor intelligence or specific strategic people solutions. We tailor each assignment to your business needs and deliver relevant data and information on a range of market demographics to provide you with valuable insight.  Following a calculated and proven research methodology, we accurately collect and collate market data and use this to analyse and extract valuable insights into a specific market of interest.

For instance, data analytics and insights into a talent market can include a breakdown of people with a specific skillset or role by gender, location, industry, company, qualifications and salary. The synthesised data is graphically presented as a clear snapshot accompanied by key observations, trends and recommendations of a specific market. This helps produce actionable insights for leaders to make informed data-driven decisions.