Proco Global is an international recruitment business with a difference, in that we only recruit supply chain talent, but we source that talent for many of the world’s largest and most successful corporations. We’ve been doing it since 2008, and have grown to 100 people in nine offices around the world, but when we opened our doors in Germany three years ago, it was a new kind of model that we were selling.
In the Frankfurt market, our approach is pretty different to that of our competitors. We are less reactive, and instead of waiting for job openings to arise, we are much more focused on setting up communications with decision-makers in the supply chain universe. We want to build relationships, and we do that by sharing content, sharing knowledge, and learning from those decision-makers so that we can truly add value and offer something different.
Instead of calling HR professionals all day, we want to be referred by line managers to HR, because we have opened discussions and started a conversation focused on the supply chain. We cover four industry sectors from Frankfurt – Process & Chemicals, Industrial Equipment, Retail and Medical Devices – and we seek to know those sectors inside out. In our teams, we have functional and sometimes even submarket specialisations, so the approach is extremely niche, but is focused on deep knowhow. If we can get that right, we become a go-to adviser for our clients, and that’s what makes us tick.
We are very specialised and we spend all our time networking. Plus we take our cross-border remit seriously: within the Frankfurt office, we have German, American, Russia, Dutch, English, Macedonian and Chilean nationals, and we all work to develop international clients all over the EMEA region, not just on our doorstep. It helps that almost everyone is also fluent in German, which is important when we are working with German companies based closer to home.
On any day of the week, those of us based in Frankfurt can be working with clients as far afield as Italy, South Africa or Dubai. But wherever our clients take us, we remain focused on relationships: in other recruitment firms clients can passed from consultant to consultant as they do business around the world, but at Proco we don’t hand things over, just work in cooperation with our colleagues in other places in a way that suits our clients.
Germany may not be as developed in terms of recruitment as places like New York and London, but we have brought our model of recruiting across the supply chain into this market, and it has proved a success. It’s exciting to be breaking new ground and proving that a concept based on being deliberate specialists and changing the way recruitment is done can work just as well here as it has elsewhere.