Craig Morgans is director of talent acquisition, emerging talent and employee experience at the AA, the UK’s largest motoring organization. He first caught the recruitment bug during his nine-year tenure with Yellow Pages, specializing in recruitment having been promoted through several generalist roles having joined direct from college.

Now, Morgans directs the AA’s contingent workforce program, which has been managed in close partnership with Guidant Global since 2017. The partnership was first-generation, Morgans says. “We didn’t have any structure or onsite presence to build upon. We built a bespoke team/solution, fast-tracked the implementation and the results were amazing,” he says. And that work resulted in the partnership being named the Best Onsite RPO-Team at the 2018 UK In-House Recruitment Awards, which Morgans cites as his proudest accomplishment.

For Morgans, the biggest challenge of the past year was the sheer volume of hiring faced by the team, numbers that drastically changed almost overnight. Ultimately, Morgans and the team delivered 296% more hires than the organization’s forecasted manpower plan. 

Moving forward, Morgans predicts that IR35 will cause movement in the UK marketplace with candidates seeking fixed-term, permanent opportunities and believes providers must differentiate themselves through their use of technology. Morgans believes the most important factor in creating a successful contingent solution, however, “is living and breathing values, honesty and the partnership approach.”