How a Fully Outsourced Recruitment Service for Crewing Up Keeps Your Project on Schedule

When a project mobilises, an outage window opens, or a new energy asset moves from construction to operations, the hiring pressure arrives fast.

Roles multiply, timelines compress, and internal TA resource — already stretched — suddenly needs to operate like a dedicated delivery function.

For TA leads, HR directors, and project directors in the power generation, renewables, and nuclear sectors, this is the moment when a fully outsourced recruitment service for crewing up stops being a nice-to-have and becomes operationally essential.

This guide covers how outsourced delivery actually works in practice: the operating model, reporting cadences, compliance dependencies, and how to scale a hiring programme without compromising process integrity.

Why Crewing Up in Energy Is a Different Problem

Site mobilisation recruitment in the energy sector is not simply high-volume hiring.

It sits at the intersection of technical scarcity, regulatory constraint, and compressed delivery timelines.

Each of which creates its own failure mode.

The talent pool is thinner than it looks

Whether you are building out an operations team for a battery storage facility, standing up a maintenance function for a combined-cycle gas plant, or deploying a multi-discipline crew for a planned nuclear outage, the available labour pool for qualified professionals is genuinely small.

Commissioning engineers with HV authorisation experience, mechanical maintenance engineers with COMAH upper tier site background, or operations technicians with the right nuclear baseline clearances are not waiting on job boards.

They are already engaged, often on long notice periods or retained by a competitor.

Compliance creates hidden lead times

On any major energy project, COMAH upper tier obligations, nuclear security vetting requirements, and contractor IR35 status determinations all add lead time that project plans routinely underestimate.

Counter Terrorism Check (CTC) clearance alone typically takes six to eight weeks from application.

Security Check (SC) clearance runs to around six weeks for employees — and just five years for contractors before renewal is required. Developed Vetting (DV), required for access to the most sensitive nuclear environments, can take six to nine months.

If your hiring plan does not account for these windows, your mobilisation date is already at risk.

IR35 compliance adds another layer of complexity

For project-based and outage-driven hiring, contractors are often the practical delivery mechanism.

But since the 2017 and 2021 off-payroll reforms, the responsibility for determining IR35 status now falls on the end-hirer in most cases.

Getting this wrong — whether through a blanket inside-IR35 determination that drives good contractors away, or an incorrectly outside determination that attracts HMRC scrutiny — carries real financial and reputational risk.

Working with an FCSA supply chain partner means your contingent supply chain is managed by umbrella providers who have already passed the most rigorous independent compliance testing in the sector.

The Risks of Under-Resourcing the Recruitment Function

Project directors often treat recruitment as a downstream activity — something that happens after the commercial decision is made and the programme plan is signed. In energy and nuclear, that sequencing creates problems that are difficult to recover from.

• Drop-off risk: Candidates who clear security vetting and complete onboarding paperwork only to accept a competing offer in the final two weeks represent a real, recurring pattern in nuclear and high-security power recruitment. The longer the clearance pipeline, the higher the attrition risk before day one.

• Onboarding friction: Sites with site access controls, drug and alcohol testing protocols, mandatory inductions, and trade-specific authorisation programmes create onboarding pipelines that can add two to three weeks beyond offer acceptance. If recruitment starts late, this friction compounds.

• Internal TA capacity gaps: A TA team designed to support steady-state permanent recruitment does not have the bandwidth, tooling, or specialist network to simultaneously manage a crewing-up programme across fifteen or twenty concurrent roles. Overloading that function does not accelerate hiring — it degrades quality across all workstreams.

• Reporting blind spots: Without a structured, outsourced delivery model, project and operations leaders often lack visibility of where the pipeline actually stands. By the time a problem surfaces in a programme meeting, it is too late to recover the slot.

What a Fully Outsourced Recruitment Model Actually Looks Like

A fully outsourced recruitment service for crewing up operates as an embedded talent function on your behalf — not as a transactional supplier dropping CVs into your inbox. The operating model has four practical components.​

1. Hiring strategy and role architecture

Before sourcing begins, a specialist partner builds the hiring map: which roles are critical path, which have the longest lead times (clearance, authorisation, notice period), and where the market supply constraints sit.

For a site mobilisation programme, this typically means front-loading the hardest-to-fill positions, senior operations technicians, HV-authorised engineers, or nuclear-qualified planners, while managing the broader crew in parallel.

2. Dedicated delivery team

Rather than a shared contingency model where your roles compete for consultant attention, an outsourced crewing programme is managed by a dedicated delivery team: a Recruitment Partner and specialist Talent Consultants assigned exclusively to your account.

Astute’s People Solutions gives you access to a talent team that includes bespoke marketing support, premium advertising for the duration of the campaign, and access to a network of over 100,000 energy professionals.​

3. Reporting and pipeline visibility

A well-structured outsourced model delivers weekly reporting that gives your TA lead and project director a real view of where every role stands: live pipeline volume, stage-by-stage conversion, compliance status, predicted time-to-fill, and early warning flags for roles at risk.

Data-driven reporting also captures market insights — salary benchmarks, availability windows, competing opportunities — that allow your hiring strategy to adapt in real time.​

4. Compliance management and supply chain governance

An outsourced partner with FCSA Recruiter Partner status manages the contractor supply chain on your behalf, ensuring that payroll routes, status determinations, and umbrella provider arrangements meet the standard expected by HMRC and your own procurement function.

For nuclear and high-security energy sites, this includes managing clearance applications, tracking vetting timelines, and maintaining the documentation trail required for audit.

A Practical Example: Crewing Up for a Planned Outage

Consider a power generation operator preparing for a statutory planned outage at a COMAH upper tier site.

The outage window is fixed — it cannot move — and the programme requires a rapid influx of maintenance engineers, mechanical fitters, instrumentation technicians, and outage planners, many of whom need site induction and pre-employment drug and alcohol screening before they can access the facility.

Using contingent recruitment alone, the operator would be relying on multiple agencies with no shared visibility and no account management structure.

Roles would surface late, pipelines would overlap, and the compliance function would be scrambling to manage onboarding for thirty workers arriving in the same two-week window.

Under a People Solutions crewing up model, the process looks materially different:

• The hiring map is built twelve weeks before mobilisation, identifying the critical-path roles and the compliance lead times for each

• Security vetting applications are initiated at offer stage, not after start-date confirmation

• A single delivery team manages pipeline reporting across all roles, with weekly updates shared to the TA lead and project director

• Contractor supply chain compliance is managed under the FCSA framework, removing the burden from the operator’s procurement team

• Astute’s average time to fill of 39 days — against an industry average of 67 — means even late-emerging roles have a realistic recovery window​

The result is a crewing programme that arrives on site staffed, compliant, and ready to work — not one where the outage starts with three critical positions still vacant.

Choosing the Right Delivery Model for Your Programme

Not every hiring challenge requires full outsourcing. Astute’s service range is structured to match the right model to the right problem:

How to Prepare Before You Engage an Outsourced Partner

To make the most of an outsourced recruitment engagement from day one, your internal team should be ready to provide the following:

• A confirmed role list with indicative start dates and locations, even in draft form

• Clearance requirements per role — BPSS, CTC, SC, or DV — so vetting applications can be sequenced correctly against the programme timeline​

• Site access and onboarding requirements including induction timelines, drug and alcohol screening protocols, and any trade-specific authorisation programmes

• IR35 status position for contractor roles, or agreement to use the partner’s CEST-supported assessment process​

• Hiring manager availability for briefings and first-stage interviews — the fastest programmes are the ones where internal stakeholders are responsive, not the ones with the largest candidate pool

• Reporting preferences — weekly pipeline reports, fortnightly steering calls, or a shared live dashboard — so the governance model is agreed before sourcing begins

Ramp Hiring Without Losing Control of the Process

The instinct when a crewing programme is under pressure is to widen the supply chain — add more agencies, lower the brief, accept a looser shortlist. In practice, this almost always degrades outcomes.

More suppliers means fragmented pipelines, no account ownership, and a compliance function managing contractor arrangements across ten different supply chain relationships.

The more effective approach is to concentrate delivery with a specialist partner who can operate at volume without sacrificing rigour.

That means a partner with a deep network in your specific sector — not a generalist RPO with an energy desk — and a compliance framework that meets the standards your procurement and legal teams require.

For renewable recruitment programmes involving HV grid constraints and authorisation requirements, or for nuclear recruitment programmes where security vetting lead times can run to months, the difference between a specialist outsourced partner and a broad-panel approach is measured in mobilisation dates, not marginal cost savings.

Work with Astute’s People Solutions for Your Next Crewing Programme

If you are planning a site mobilisation, moving into a crewing-up phase, or managing a hiring programme that has outgrown your internal TA capacity, People Solutions is designed for exactly that scenario.

Astute is a technical energy recruitment specialist operating across power generation, renewables, and nuclear.

Our People Solutions service gives you a fully outsourced recruitment service for crewing up — with a dedicated delivery team, end-to-end compliance management, FCSA supply chain governance, and weekly reporting that keeps your project director and TA lead aligned throughout.

With a 93% fill rate and an average time to fill of 39 days, we deliver the kind of pipeline certainty that project programmes depend on.​

Get in touch with Astute today to discuss your crewing-up requirements and find out how People Solutions can support your next mobilisation.

Related services: People Plus retained recruitment | People Search executive search | Renewable energy recruitment | Nuclear sector recruitment