Hiring at the speed of light

O’Brien Electric & Plumbing (formerly known as Laser Group) is a national network of plumbing and electrical contracting companies. Since its inception in 2004, O’Brien Electric & Plumbing has more than 140 businesses operating throughout Australia and upwards of 95 in New Zealand. Each business delivers a wide range of services, from wiring and plumbing residential buildings, through to maintenance within hotel chains and complex industrial work.

Each business in the network is independently owned. Legally, the business is a franchise, however they prefer to call themselves a membership group as they don’t adhere to a traditional franchise models in the trade services industries.

Each individual member business is systematised when it comes to in-house operations, including full end-to-end job management software and accounting systems. However, that wasn’t the case with human resources, where each individual member business was orchestrating their own recruitment, meaning there was no consistent process in place.

Across the board, the O’Brien Electric & Plumbing recruitment processes were found to be fairly vague, with no structured system for business owners to follow, no visibility on key statistics and little shared knowledge in this area. As well as this, there was no central HR team, so each manager had to recruit their own people.

To address this problem, in April 2015 O’Brien Electric & Plumbing started working with Expr3ss!, and since then has noticed a positive cultural change in the company, particularly with new staff that are proving to be a better fit to the business and more engaged with their vision.

The benchmark the organisation set for itself was for hard-working people that are accountable, responsible and have a passion for their role within the business.