Four building blocks,
one responsibility
Accommodation, vehicles, supervisors, analysis — each of them can be bought somewhere. The difference is that with us, nobody stands in between.
Across Europe
Wherever the regional market allows it, we recruit locally. Where it does not, we fall back on our own channels in Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania. On larger projects a combination of both is the norm.
What matters is who does the recruiting. We do not work through placement agencies but with our own recruiters — native speakers for each country of origin. Every applicant is assessed by them individually, in conversation in their own language: experience, resilience, reliability, motivation.
That is more work than an agency passing on CVs. It is also the reason our teams stay where others are constantly backfilling.
Pace — and why we hold back
For a single project we recruit up to 50 people a week. We could do more. We choose not to: beyond that point the quality of selection drops, and anyone hired under time pressure is typically gone again after four weeks. That is our ceiling for our own recruitment, not our record. Where more is needed we bring in additional providers under our standards — under the master vendor model, 100 to 150 a week becomes possible.
They do not all arrive on site at once. We divide those recruited into onboarding waves of 10 to 15 a week — not because we could not manage more, but because every newcomer is inducted by a supervisor from our own team. Fifty at once would be a briefing; twelve is an induction.
Building a team of 90 therefore takes a few weeks longer than it might. In return, turnover stays in single figures rather than above seventy per cent.
No housing, no staff
In regions with a tight housing market, staffing projects do not fail on recruitment. They fail on the question of where those people are going to sleep. That is usually the real bottleneck.
We solve it within our own group: BEMA Real develops, builds and holds property, BEMA Rent manages it. So we are not scrambling for whatever the market happens to offer — we build a residential cluster around your site.
- Short journeysSomeone with a ten-minute journey to their shift turns up more reliably than someone commuting for an hour.
- Independence from the housing marketRising rents or a lack of supply do not slow your project down.
- Predictable scalingAs the requirement grows, the accommodation grows with it — to plan, not to availability.
Our own vehicles
Getting to the shift does not depend on public transport here. We drive our people in our own vehicles — daily, on the shift rhythm, including nights and weekends. The fleet grows and shrinks with the projects; how many vehicles your site needs follows from the shift pattern and the distance.
That sounds unremarkable until the first early shift falls short because a bus did not run. For a three-shift operation, an own fleet is the difference between calculable and accidental staffing.
There is a further point that is easily overlooked: people arriving from abroad do not know their way around. Without a transport service, the journey to work would be the first hurdle of their day. With one, it is not a hurdle at all.
We do not supply staff,
we supply a team
- SupervisorsThey work the shift themselves — so you are not paying for a pure management post but for a worker who also leads. They induct new colleagues, secure daily performance and act as the language bridge between your operation and the team.
- CoordinatorsPermanently on your site. Your point of contact for scheduling, absences and reassignments. You do not have to ring anyone at our head office for that.
- Bilingualism as a principleEvery MBP team leader and coordinator is bilingual and interprets on the floor. Communication problems are among the most common causes of quality faults and accidents — we solve that with people, not with hope.
The practical effect: induction sits with us, not with your shift leaders. Your managers are relieved rather than additionally burdened.
We will not quote you a headcount
before we know your figures
The usual response to a staffing shortage is a quote for heads at an hourly rate. That answers the wrong question.
Before we submit a proposal we look at performance data by shift and team, goods in and out, absences, sickness levels and drop-out rates. From that it is usually clear whether a drop in performance is process-driven or staffing-driven. Only in the second case are we the right answer at all.
That analysis is part of our proposal, not a chargeable extra.
We keep measuring once the work is running. How deep the reporting goes and how often you receive it we agree with you — some clients want one figure a week, others a monthly evaluation across all shifts.
And then the interesting part begins
Sickness rate, turnover and no-show rate are the beginning, not the goal. What interests us is how effectively work is actually done in your operation: picks per hour, units per shift, travel distances, cycle losses, handovers between shifts.
Evaluations of that kind have produced performance gains of up to 20 per cent in our projects — through changed deployment planning, different team composition, better induction. That is the order of magnitude at which the additional cost of agency work over own staff cancels itself out.
Which is precisely why we do not discuss hourly rates before we have discussed performance.