High-volume customer service & collections recruitment for consumer lending business
What did they need?
A leading fintech company offering innovative, technology-driven financial solutions. Known for their user-friendly platform and transparent lending process, they have rapidly grown in the UK market by providing personal loans that are fast, fair, and flexible. As part of their expansion strategy, the business set out to strengthen their customer support infrastructure to ensure service excellence as demand increased.
How did Huntress solve it?
What did they need? Urgent Recruitment Upscaling
Our client was in the process of establishing a new call centre, with plans to relocate. With this in motion, they required urgent recruitment support to scale their frontline operations. Within a 10-week window, they needed to recruit a high volume of Collections Consultants, Financial Support Consultants, and Customer Service Representatives.
These roles were critical to their ability to uphold their service standards, support their rapidly growing customer base, and meet performance metrics such as call resolution times, customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), and collections efficiency. The recruitment strategy needed to align with their business objectives: scaling rapidly while maintaining quality and cultural fit.
Huntress’ Recruitment Strategy
Huntress responded immediately with a dedicated account/resourcing team and a tailored recruitment plan. Understanding our client's fast-paced environment and commitment to excellence, Huntress devised a solution that was both agile and comprehensive.
Key Actions Taken:
Local Market Insights: Huntress used detailed employment market insights to identify candidate hotspots, ensuring a strong pipeline of talent ahead of their relocation and ensuring candidates’ ability to commute to both areas.
High-Volume Recruitment Campaigns: Coordinated advertising, CV sourcing, and talent pooling across multiple platforms (such as various job boards, LinkedIn Recruiter, advertisements and our preexisting database) to quickly generate a pool of highly competent, available and qualified candidates.
Temp-to-Perm Model: To onboard staff quickly while providing both our client and candidates with flexibility, Huntress introduced a temp-to-perm recruitment model. This enabled them to access talent at speed while evaluating performance and fit in real time. A free transfer after a set period was built into the model, giving the client a cost-effective and low-risk route to permanent hires.
Onboarding Support and Scheduling: Managed all stages of the process including pre-screening, written skills testing, interview scheduling, onboarding logistics, and candidate aftercare.
Consultative Partnership: Huntress worked closely with the client to shape job descriptions, advise on salary benchmarking, and provide regular market feedback to refine the hiring criteria.
Challenges Overcome
One of the main challenges was navigating the shift between two locations, while maintaining consistent candidate engagement. Huntress overcame this by clearly communicating the move to all candidates from the outset and ensuring the employer brand was presented attractively to reassure potential hires.
Additionally, hiring at such volume in a compressed timeframe presented a logistical hurdle. Huntress overcame this by increasing internal resource allocation and using rolling assessment days to manage bulk recruitment efficiently.
The temp-to-perm strategy was particularly effective in maintaining flexibility while ensuring the client's service centre could go live with a full, functioning team.
What were the results?
Over the 10-week campaign, Huntress successfully placed a full cohort of collections and customer service professionals, ensuring the new support centre launched on time and with a highly capable team.
- The client met its operational go-live date without delay.
- The temp-to-perm approach allowed for rapid scaling while ensuring a strong cultural and performance fit for long-term hires.
- The newly built team contributed to improved response times, increased customer satisfaction scores, and stronger internal team performance.
- Feedback from hiring managers highlighted the high quality and preparation of candidates, resulting in low attrition and strong cultural alignment.