Resources
Customer story
Multi-unit F&B — Dubai, UAE: strategic people work & Hire
A multi-unit food and beverage company in Dubai, United Arab Emirates—about 200 people—had new leadership after years without real training discipline or steady HR process. Service quality, day-to-day rhythm, and revenue were drifting. Reviewing everyone by hand would have taken months and kept managers off the floor. They needed an honest picture of the workforce and hiring that would not recycle the same bad fits. Lykos Measure gave that picture quickly; Lykos Hire tightened who moved forward. Payroll, bench strength, and time-to-fill could finally be discussed in one thread.
Key takeaways
- About 200 people: Measure in about five business days vs a months-long manual plan; 24 high-potential, about 25% flagged for support or realignment.
- The real shape of the organization—including a weak middle—without freezing the business for a long paper project.
- Hire: about one hour to set the bar, pipeline in days, same-week interviews; about 30-day time-to-hire down to about one week, stronger two-year retention on their numbers.
- Exec line: about $40k/month overspend avoided for three months, dozens of roles repurposed, six-month revenue-at-risk in the low hundreds of thousands—pressure-test on a walkthrough.
The situation
A full manual pass on about 200 people risked bias, long delay, and pulling managers out of the operation. Hiring had to keep pace with growth without overstaffing, inflating payroll, or repeating hires that would not last. There was no shared early read on fit to role, bench depth, or weak spots in the structure.
What we focused on
They used Lykos Measure for the workforce review: roughly a 15-minute employee assessment, a tight completion window, and a short manager review phase—instead of a long manual scoring project. For hiring they used Lykos Hire: role criteria set in about an hour, a pipeline within days, and interviews in the same week, with clearer CV and role-fit signal before offers.
Lykos sat alongside their existing HR setup—nothing forced them to replace the whole stack overnight.
What improved
The workforce review finished in about five business days instead of the multi-month manual plan. They found 24 people rated high potential for leadership tracks; 48 people, about a quarter of the group, needed support or realignment; two managers stood out as hurting morale and sales; a thin middle-management layer showed up as a plain fact, not a rumor.
On hiring, time to surface candidates fell from about 10 days to about 3 (their tracking); time-to-hire from about 30 days to about a week. About 75% of new hires were still in role at two years on their benchmark—far above the short tenure they saw before.
On money (their summary): roughly $40k per month in salary overspend avoided for three consecutive months, about 40 roles reworked at roughly $1,500/month average compensation, and on the order of $150k–$200k in revenue they associated with disruption risk over six months.