Case Study: Virgin Orbit achieves faster hiring of hard-to-find rocket scientists with iCIMS

How Virgin Orbit was set up for success to hire rocket scientists

Virgin Orbit, founded in 2017 and based in Long Beach, CA, builds and launches satellite-carrying rockets and employs about 500 people. The company’s six-person recruiting team struggled to hire scarce, highly specialized talent—rocket scientists—because it was forced to share a recruitment platform with sister companies, preventing needed configuration changes and slowing candidate throughput.

Virgin Orbit engaged Kelton Legend to move to a dedicated iCIMS instance, clone and customize workflows and dashboards, and implement integrations with Ultimate Software and First Advantage for seamless HR data flow and background screening. The new, independent setup streamlined processes, improved the candidate experience and transparency, and freed recruiters to focus on sourcing hard-to-find passive talent, accelerating hiring for mission-critical roles.

Virgin Orbit

Gary Michael

Manager of Talent Acquisition