Is your TA transformation on track?
A leading rail services provider partnered with AMS to strengthen onboarding speed, compliance, and governance for a safety critical workforce. Operating in a highly regulated environment with continuous hiring demand, the organization needed to reduce time to offer while maintaining rigorous standards for screening, training, and supplier performance. Through supply chain optimization and targeted service enhancements, AMS helped the client accelerate onboarding, improve hiring manager experience, and deliver measurable efficiency gains.
While railways have moved passengers and freight for the past 200 years, technology and hiring practices have moved well beyond the 1800s. In the modern world of jet travel and electric cars, rail operators must recruit the best candidates to keep trains safe and on schedule.
Our client, a leading provider of rail services in the UK, is known to empower a safety-critical workforce on the railway with the support of specialists hired through careful talent acquisition (TA).
The recruitment process is continuous and highly compliant, supplying hundreds of engineers, maintainers and operatives who work around the clock. Each candidate undergoes background checks, substance testing, medical screenings, and training in worktime tracking, safety and fatigue management.
Our client officially joined a government framework for professional contingent labor supply and successfully transitioned all incumbent specialists to a supply chain agency comprising 19 SME suppliers.
To speed up time-to-offer, our client partnered with AMS to establish a separate pricing schedule with the agency. This covered the costs of candidates’ personnel track safety accreditation, drug and alcohol testing, PPE, and other services provided by the agency.
To maximize service delivery and ensure our client’s high standard of governance and compliance, AMS reviewed the performance of the agency over the past 18 months and chose only the best suppliers.
All specialist requirements are now sent directly to the agency, which has enhanced user experience and significantly reduced the time it takes to hire and onboard new workers. The current average time is 13 days, surpassing the original target of 22 days.
Working together with AMS, our client has been able to accomplish various service enhancement projects, including over 40 hiring manager workshops, an online chat function that answers general inquiries and insights into over 20 market sectors. Further, their service enhancements initiative includes conducting regular calls with the agency’s suppliers to evaluate performance and results to ensure engagement levels remain high, with an emphasis on the quality of outcomes.
Our client’s Delivery Director notes their “partnership with AMS has supported them in reducing their reliance on framework contractors and resulted in efficiency savings instead.” They continue, “We have found remarkable improvements in our TA process, efficiently maintaining a most important safety-critical workforce to drive the UK rail forward.”
AMS powers talent strategies that deliver results, redefining a new era of talent driven by people, process, data and technology.
50M+ candidates assessed annually
2,000+ enterprise clients
40+ years of innovation
AMS offers digital innovation and responsible AI, providing agile talent acquisition solutions and talent consulting services that can scale with your business.
© 2025 Alexander Mann Solutions (AMS)
