Sales & Marketing

We were one of Argyll Scott’s first teams in Singapore nearly 10 years ago. Companies were struggling to grow and connect their brands to Asian consumers due to a scarcity of high-quality Sales & Marketing professionals who truly understood the Asian market. Retained search firms were too slow and cumbersome to seize the opportunity and larger transactional recruitment agencies were not able to uncover hard to find the talent needed in Singapore. So, we employed a range of bespoke search methods but in a proactive, fast-moving, and affordable way, accelerating the growth of many consumer firms in the region.

Although the talent pool of consumer-focused Sales & Marketing professionals has grown in Asia, the market is still very short of digital talent. The competition from very nimble starts-ups and challenger brands has also increased. These companies are often more “digitally native” thus more attractive to digital talent. To help our clients with their expansion plans, we opened and scaled local Sales & Marketing offerings in Hong Kong and Thailand and further expanded our networks with purely digital marketing led teams. ​

Our success is built on our ability to identify the highest calibre Asia-focussed consumer talent for our clients from their competition. We also add value through our insights into what the best performing brands are doing to connect with their audiences and how to replicate this. We love operating in a space where we can touch, feel and see our client's products, enabling them to move quickly with their hiring plans and scale their functions faster, so they can seize even more opportunities in Asian and global markets.

A great solution for hiring talent into your business quickly and effectively. Whether you’re recruiting for a handful of roles a year or a handful of roles a week, we are here to use our extensive network to find the best candidates for you.

Key features:

• We source and secure high calibre talent using innovative, customised search methods

• Dedicated resourcing of 1 or 2 recruiters in your specific disciplines

• Time to hire: 2 to 4 weeks, including search

• Shortlists within 48 hours

• Pre-agreed timeline to hire​

Why you’ll love it:

• Quick and easy access to engaged and active talent​

• Reduced time to hire

• Less time spent interviewing

• Less time spent reviewing resumes

Hire interim and Fixed-Term Contract (FTC) talent to complement your existing permanent workforce. This solution is best suited to businesses needing to plug skills gaps or bolster existing resource on a short-term basis. Our in-house contractor care team can fully manage your payroll, mobility, and visa processes.

Key features:

• High-quality supply of Interim and FTC resource within required timescales

• Access to our local and global community of candidates and cutting-edge expertise

• All contractors pre-screened and vetted as requested

• Dedicated account manager to provide a single point of contact

• We will onboard and manage contractors throughout the contractor lifecycle, including payrolling

• We always find a cost-efficient way to run projects without compromising on quality with minimal overall impact on current resources

Why you’ll love it:

• Rapidly ramp up & scale down resource to suit your needs

• Cost-efficient way to run projects without compromising on quality

• Bring on contractors without having a payroll or benefits package in place, significantly reducing costs

• Gives you the ability to hire permanent staff when you don’t have the correct legal entity set up

• Faster contractor onboarding

• Helps to mitigate against payroll risks, streamline your financial and commercial processes and improve service delivery

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Carried out by expert researchers, our market maps provide invaluable insight into active and passive candidate communities within specific market areas and aim to help you gain a more comprehensive understanding of your market position.

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Key features:

• Using both our Regional Research Center of Excellence (COE) and experienced in-country Consultants, we will objectively map niche markets

• Fully bespoke from a location, skill set and seniority perspective

• Proactive and organic for quick access and use

Why you’ll love it:

• Better awareness of the candidate pools available in your market

• Increased awareness of your employer brand to help you stand out from the crowd

• Benchmark your talent strategy against the most effective in the market

• Gives you the ability to rapidly ramp up and scale down resource

• Successfully headhunt direct competition to your business

• Arms you with the information you need to make a business case on your talent requirements

• Your experience will be interactive - we’ll empower you and engage candidates towards your brand

Perfect for senior hires or multiple roles requiring similar niche skill sets. We take full responsibility for the entire search – our approach is targeted and specific, we meet and screen all prospective candidates for cultural fit before considering an introduction.

Key features:

• Time to hire: 4-8 weeks, including search and shortlisting

• Pre-defined timelines and start date for the candidate agreed as the search is started

• Dedicated recruitment team on each specific search, to ensure a thorough search and all relevant candidates in the market are spoken to

• Weekly updates on your search

• Option to conduct market mapping and report on your brand perception in the market

• Staggered pricing solutions, in line with different hiring phases

Why you’ll love it:

• You gain preferred access to the best pools of active and passive candidates in your market

• Your experience will be interactive - we’ll empower you and engage candidates towards your brand

• Guaranteed to secure the hire

• Remain anonymous whilst you go out to market

• Easier to plan around a pre-agreed start date

• Ability to spread the cost across a number of weeks or months

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A cost-effective and time-saving solution to help you streamline your hiring process while maintaining total transparency. We will conduct a thorough research on your company’s brand and competitor positioning so we can align your employer brand with your hiring strategy.

Key features:

• Dedicated recruiter embedded into your business – but also still fully connected to the Argyll Scott ecosystem

• Pre-defined SLA’s

• Full account management team and regular reviews

• 100% focus from recruitment team

• Flexible billing structure

Why you’ll love it:

• Cost-saving without quality saving

• Combined benefits of both the search and RPO model

• Search firm brand ambassador and extension of your internal HR / Talent Acquisition team

• Faster to hire because of the better understanding we have of your business

• Market knowledge and intel to help shape your hiring strategies and decisions

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Our client, a well-known luxury clothing company, was looking to replace the incumbent Retail Manager due to performance issues, so required a search that would be quiet and sensitive.

The right-fit candidate needed to have a strong luxury retail background, and experience in 360-degree regional retail management, including people and culture, and P&L. The retailer had already approached a few candidates discreetly, but to no avail. They mandated Argyll Scott to help, due to our strong partnership since having previously made a senior placement with them.

Our solution:

We conducted a thorough mapping exercise of the relevant talent in the luxury retail market. Our regional teams came together to also identify those candidates keen to relocate to Singapore or returning Singaporeans from abroad who fit the brief. We used our platform to deploy discreet digital adverts on LinkedIn and relevant job boards to attract more candidates.

Understanding that personality and cultural fit was vital, we arranged comprehensive screenings and interview sessions prior to presenting candidates’ profiles. The hiring manager was provided with a weekly update on the search status throughout the project.

The outcome:

• Of the initial 43 candidates shortlisted, four were presented and interviewed.

• There was a long waiting time between interview stages, because of the retailer’s internal recruitment processes. As such, keeping the candidates warm and engaged was especially important, while we kept close to the hiring manager for updates.

• When the offered candidate unexpectedly fell through at the finishing line, we backfilled this position within just four weeks.

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The challenge:

Our client, a US Food Safety Company, was setting up a new office in Singapore to hire a new Sales Director to find and develop new accounts but had no plans to expand their entity. This was a unique working from home role, requiring strong language capabilities and cultural understanding with a not very competitive reward package, making candidate attraction difficult. The client also needed to be able to payroll this person in Singapore, with no internal capability set up to do this.

Our solution:

Our 3-part retainer took care of everything, from sourcing to payrolling and consulting on the unique challenges of the Asian hiring market. We provided the hiring manager with a status update every week which included salary expectations, culture differences and types of profiles we would find.

Our full market map of relevant talent across Singapore, Indonesia and Hong Kong, our extensive outreach and utilisation of our own networks to uncover active candidates and referrals resulted into a longlist of 50 high calibre candidates, then a shortlist of four, who were all interviewed. In the meantime, our payroll solutions team created a smooth and expansive solution to payroll this hire.

Although their two initial offers were turned down due to on-par reward package, we worked very closely with the HR VP to ensure candidate quality was not compromised and by slightly flexing the budget we secured an immediately available B2B Sales Director who fully met the brief.

The outcome:

• The hiring manager was so happy with our solution that we were also given a Marketing Manager role to fill. We onboarded both candidates quickly enabling them to attend their global industry trade show in Canada.

• Throughout the assignment, the client could count on us for transparency, local market knowledge and consultative solutions.

• We maintain a strong relationship and continue to provide payroll and contracting solutions to help accelerate their growth in the region.

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The challenge:

Our client, a multinational alcoholic beverages company, was setting up a new Global Travel Retail COE in Singapore. They were struggling to find the right talent for this team due to the very small global talent pool and the fact that much of the Travel Retail talent in Asia lacked the global experience required.

Additionally, the hiring team needed some consultative support to help them better understand how to structure their global, regional, and domestic Travel Retail teams, learning from best practice and their competitors in the industry.

Our solution:

We began by mapping all the Travel Retail hubs in the alcohol industry, globally. Our Research COE built mini org-charts of these businesses and uncovered the contact details of relevant key candidates.

Two of our more experienced headhunters qualified the candidates to uncover those who fit the requirements around scope, experience and tenure. This included meeting, interviewing, and selling the company’s employer brand to gain approval to be submitted for their potential openings.

The outcome:

• We filled their last two key positions in the Travel Retail function in Singapore to enable the business to grow.

• We also relocated another candidate into a very hard to fill Travel Retail role in Miami which the client had been struggling to fill for some time.

• Our client used the basis of our market map to structure how they set up their COE in Singapore.

• The hiring manager was so satisfied with our work on this project that we have continued to work with them in their regional and local businesses on both retained and contingent mandates.

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