10 Questions to Ask Before Outsourcing

Find out some of the most common problems that come along with outsourcing,
particularly with technology initiatives. These problems include the lack of an escape
clause; too little preparation for cultural issues, such as unhappy employees and
managers; and a failure to first figure out whether the outsourcing effort will really
provide a return on investment.
By Samuel Greengard
The complexity of today’s human resources management systems and the technical
demands placed on an organization--and its IT department--are leading many companies
down the path of business process outsourcing.
But achieving success is no simple matter. Not only is it important to know when to
outsource, but it’s also essential to know how to use outsourcing to full advantage. Here
are 10 questions that industry guru Naomi Bloom says organizations should ask before
embracing human resources BPO:
• Does the outsourcing opportunity match the organization’s business needs?
If an outsourcing initiative can create a strategic advantage, then it’s worth
pursuing. If it’s merely intended to deal with temporary tactical problems--such as
a reluctance to invest in an upgrade to a core HRMS while revenues are down--
then it’s doomed to failure.
• Will outsourcing improve performance? A successful outsourcing initiative
translates into service that is better than it would be if an organization handled the
tasks internally. Before turning to BPO, it’s important to ask how and why it will
drive improvements.
• How can an organization that turns to outsourcing develop excellent human
resources generalists, specialists and experts in managing vendor
relationships? Remaining human resources executives and managers use metrics
and other measurements to ensure that the company is managing its initiatives and
relationships well and meeting business goals.
• How can an organization understand and control costs? It’s essential to
understand the cost structure for various components of outsourcing, particularly
if the entire package of products and services is bundled into a single fee.
• How can outsourcing affect the organization in an acquisition, merger or sale
of a peripheral business? Any structural change to the organization can create
new challenges and alter the dynamics of the business. It’s wise to understand
such implications up front.
• Are the financial projections accurate? Take a critical look at the numbers,
particularly those generated by a vendor, and try to spot assumptions, oversimplifications
or just plain misleading figures.
• Are adequate protections in place for when business conditions change?
Make sure that the proposed contract protects your organization as much as it
protects the outsourcing provider. Your business may look quite different three to
five years from now.
• What are the cultural ramifications of BPO? How will managers and
employees react to the changes? Will these individuals view the new system as a
positive or a negative? How can such reactions affect the success of the initiative?
Is it possible that these individuals will walk out if they see a major upheaval?
• Who will manage the financial and performance aspects of the project?
Without people, processes and technology to measure and manage the
outsourcing initiative, an organization can find itself overspending and
underachieving. Factoring the management aspects of the task into the initial
proposal can reduce the odds of problems occurring later on.
• Is there an escape strategy? If the BPO provider fails to live up to expectations--
even with a solid service-level agreement in place--or if the vendor is acquired by
another firm that has been previously rejected (because of management style,
ethics, customer-service track record, technology, geographic coverage or other
factor), there must be a way to make a change without enduring a crippling
disruption.

The Big 3 Efficiency Metrics in Recruiting

Doug Fuehne, Co-founder and Vice President of Client Services, Scalability, and Strategy
Q4B, Inc. (Quantum Solutions for Business)
www.q4b.com

Measuring success is critical in recruiting. There are four general types of metrics on which to concentrate -- cost, quality, quantity, and time. One way we measure "quality" is using the Big 3 Efficiency metrics.

Efficiency is a funny thing. It can mean many different things to different people. For example, the Laws of Thermodynamics tell us that any engine or machine is doing very well if it is operating at 80% efficiency, which means that 80% of the energy input is turned into useful work. They also tell us that NO machine can operate at 100% efficiency.

In recruiting, efficiency measures how well recruiters are doing their job and effectiveness of the recruiting process. At Q4B, our Big 3 metrics are:
1. submittal efficiency,
2. interview efficiency, and
3. offer efficiency.

Submittal Efficiency
The first, submittal efficiency, is a measure of how well the submitted candidates fit against the requisition profile. It is defined as the number of candidates interviewed divided by the total number of candidates submitted. You would expect this number to be high. However, as in Thermodynamics, it can be TOO high. If it is 100%, the recruiter is not pushing the edges of the requisition specifications, which means you are probably missing good candidates.

However, if your submittal efficiency is too low, it indicates the hiring managers are spending too much time reviewing resumes. This could be because the recruiter may be doing a poor job, or perhaps the requisition has been poorly specified. As a whole, hiring managers and recruiters are doing well if three of every four submittals make it to interviews (75% efficiency). Flashing-red-light warnings should start to go off if less than one in two (50% efficiency) make it to interviews, meaning it is time to investigate to determine problem areas.

Interview Efficiency
Next, the interview efficiency is a measure of the hiring manager's screening process. It is defined as the number of candidates who receive offers divided by the number of candidates interviewed. You would expect this number to be lower than the submittal efficiency, since most people want to interview several candidates for one offer. The goal is to shoot for 30% efficiency, which means your organization is making offers to one out of every three to four interviewed candidates. If less than one in six candidates interviewed actually receives an offer (16% efficiency), it should be an indicator that it is time to investigate again. With low efficiencies there could be any number of problems, most of which are issues in the screening process, including a hiring manager who is overly selective. However, recruiters can be great assets during this phase because they can help out with scheduling interviews, prepping candidates, gathering immediate interview feedback, and generally guiding the process.

Offer Efficiency
The third of the Big 3 is the offer efficiency, a measure of how many candidates actually accept your offers and start working with you. It is calculated as the number of candidates accepting offers divided by the total number of offers. Since the recruiters should be helping hiring managers extend offers that will be accepted, as well as pre-closing the candidates, we expect this ratio to be high. If the process yields 80% offer efficiency, or four out of five offers are accepted, you are doing well. Conversely, if less than three in five offers are accepted (60% efficiency), then something in your recruiting processes will need to be modified or addressed. Low offer efficiencies could mean the recruiter is doing a poor job of pre-closing the candidate or negating counteroffers. Or perhaps the offers themselves are undesirable, whether from a financial standpoint or on other dimensions, such as too much travel or an undesirable work location. Also, as with submittal efficiencies, the offer efficiencies percentage can be too high. If 100% of people accept your offers, perhaps you are offering too much money for the job.

The efficiency metrics are relatively easy to gather and calculate, and very helpful in monitoring the quality of the recruiting process. By investigating the issues indicated by the efficiencies, it's possible to identify potential problem areas in sufficient time to take corrective action and still make hires on time.

Another benefit of the efficiency ratios is that by multiplying all three of them together, it's possible to calculate the expected number of hires from the number of submittals, assisting your planning process. For example, multiplying the lower bound of the "good" efficiencies (75% X 30% X 80%) = 18%, which means you need to submit between five and six candidates to get one hire.

Have an efficient recruiting day!

Does Your RPO Vendor Comprendo Your Culture?

So you've elected to outsource a portion of your recruitment process - that's a big step for your company. The demand is certainly justified since you've got lots of open requisitions and hiring managers are crying for quality applicants to fill their positions. All the prospective RPO vendors are asking about the nature of the positions as they seek job descriptions and compensation bands. Obviously their understanding of the open positions is important and the more data they have available will improve their prospecting. Put aside for a moment judging whether they can actually fill the positions you need filled. When you got into conversations with them, how much did they attempt to understand the personality desired for the positions and about the culture of your firm overall? Did they truly grasp your business model and how each role, in some way, contributes to the organization? While some RPO firm's practical fit might look right on paper during the bidding process, ascertaining the overall cultural compatibility between you and your RPO firm is crucial to your mutual success.

(HR Outsourcing consistently emphasizes the need for strong cultural compatibility when selecting the right vendor. The typical demands of cultural compatibility revolve around how well a vendor's representatives assimilate into the client's corporate personality, pace, demands, schedules, vernacular, etc.)

Now think about how the need for a cultural match is magnified when selecting a Recruitment Process Outsourcing partner. Not only is the vendor trying to figure out the nuances of the client environment, but the RPO firm is now on the hook for absorbing the client's culture well enough to attract the next waves of talent to the organization! Adopting the client's corporate culture needs to happen quickly and convincingly.

So, what are some of the indicators companies should look for when selecting an RPO firm to know how good of a "cultural sponge" they can be?

Professionalism during the bid process
Did they communicate well throughout the process? Treat you respectfully, arrive on time, and stick to deadlines on their deliverable schedules during the bid? Did they communicate to your satisfaction in person, by phone and using email? How comfortable were they when handling objections or challenges?

Speaking your Business Language
Did they take the time to understand your business? Did you find their language to quickly mirror yours? Do they have relevant experience in your industry that will expedite the assimilation into your organization? Do they have experience with clients that are experiencing the same challenges faced by your organization?

Metrics/Accountability
Metrics are necessities in outsourcing relationships yet vendors embrace metrics differently. When selecting the right RPO firm, you want the level of detail from metrics to match how your company appreciates the quantitative side of relationships. Did the prospective vendor not only grasp why your suggested metrics are important ("if we do well here it will contribute to the success of my client's business") but suggest appropriate industry metrics that also can help contribute to your success? Are they altogether resistant to metrics?

Technology adoption
Can they plug into what you have? Can they bring what you don't have? Either way, you need someone who understands what you need and trust they have the experience and know-how to deliver it. In addition, they'll need to understand your organization's ability to integrate technology - can they do that?

Thorough Communication
Do they "get" that your organization's hiring managers aren't very technologically savvy and will need more than normal training on the technologies you bring to the table? Do they "get" how much hiring managers were previously involved in recruitment and that it will take many conversations and much time to wean them off their old ways? If an RPO vendor doesn't have the ability to understand and assimilate with your firm's culture - simply from a missed, incorrect, or lack of communication perspective - absolute failure of the engagement is a strong possibility.

Are the RPO's recruiters Full-Time Employees or Contractors
The RPO firm that has full-time associates may have a more loyal following of recruiters who are more familiar with the RPO relationship model. Their commitment to your project also extends beyond the engagement and may have a broader sense of ownership in making sure they help deliver a quality project for you as a client and for their company.

Compliance
EEOC, OFCCP and other areas of compliance in recruitment vary widely by industry and company size. Make sure the RPO firm understands your specific recruitment compliance needs and is not intimidated to go as far as your company is required to go.

References
Seek at least two client case studies to contact ideally similar to your RPO project. Get a feel for the relationship, level of communication, and results realized from their experiences. Did they previously do a good job, or did they do a good job and were well liked?

The X Factor
At the end of the day, if they feel like a vendor they're just a vendor. Getting the right RPO firm means you've found a new business partner - an extension of your own company. At the end of the day, you must be aligned that their success is your success and your success is their success…so, do they comprendo?

By Matt Aprahamian and Brad Cummings, Monument Consulting

Offshoring RPO - Is it for you?

Offshoring is defined as the transfer of a business process to a foreign country to take advantage of the lower cost of operations in the foreign location.

Offshore Recruitment Process Outsourcing thus, can be defined as when some or all of the recruitment processes are outsourced at an overseas location to take advantage of the labor wage arbitrage.

Companies sometimes look at offshoring a select non-core group of functions that makes their internal teams more productive and thus improves the hiring manager satisfaction with the internal recruitment department.

However automated the recruitment process has become, a large portion of the recruiters time is still taken up with resume searching (Job Boards, ATS), Internet mining/sourcing, resume screening, response management, candidates processing (online technical tests, assessment centers) and other functions which, when managed correctly, can be successfully outsourced.

Most recruiters would rather utilize their time with business development, building relationships and networking candidates or spending time with their hiring mangers than undertaking many of these outsourceable functions.

Services that offshore RPO companies offer:

• Candidate Sourcing or Resume Mining: The offshore company can search your own database, ATS, their own database of candidates, job boards, search engines, blogs and forums to build a candidate pool. In many cases, due to the time difference, the offshore company will help reduce your time to fill by looking for the best active and passive candidates while your team in the US is sleeping.
• Job Marketing: Some offshore companies can help you write more effective job descriptions to improve the candidate response rate. They can advise you on what job boards to use to optimize candidate quality. Others may offer more vanilla offerings like taking on the work of posting jobs on the various job boards and community websites and keeping them updated. By keeping the job current, your posting will be viewed by many more candidates.
• Resume Screening: Tired out looking at unqualified resumes that don't fit the requisition? Recruiters are often inundated by resumes when advertising on job boards. Screening resume costs the recruiter a lot of time when their focus should be on building relationships and networking. Offshore companies can help screen resumes to find the best matches.
• Calendaring or Interview Scheduling: You can give away the onerous task of scheduling interviews and making travel arrangements for interviews etc to a staffing coordinator based offshore.
• Technical Interviews: Some offshore RPO companies offer assistance regarding conducting in-depth phone interviews or even technical interviews. The strong education, and sometimes technical, background of the recruiters does help here. You can use the offshore company to do a phone interview with the candidate and understand the candidate's motivation for a job change. The recruiters can evaluate at the candidates on role fitment, aptitude and attitude. Your choice of vendor becomes critical here. - some companies come very close to US onsite recruiters interims of evaluating candidates and building a strong relationship.
• Reference Check & Background Screening: Offshore companies to do offer reference check and background screening services.

Who should consider RPO?
Contrary to what people may believe, even one person independent recruiters can look at offshoring to increase their productivity. A lot of recruiters I connect with spend about 60-70% of their time looking for resumes, screening them, scheduling interviews etc. Almost all of them feel that their time can be better spent on developing client and candidate relationships or networking.

For larger companies, the decision is easier. They can offshore activities that are non core and keep the high value add activities for in-house recruiters. This not only increases the recruiter's productivity but also their job satisfaction.

Are you ready for offshore RPO?
The following checklist will help determine if you are ready of offshore some of the recruitment functions.
I am looking to solve the following problems (check all that apply):

• Your recruiters are spending too much time on job boards- searching for resumes and then screening unqualified resume responses
• You feel your recruiters should be spending more time on the phone building relationships
• Your hiring manager is dissatisfied and breathing down your neck to reduce the time to hire
• Your recruiting budget has been slashed and you are being asked to deliver more with less
• You want a focused group looking for diversity candidates.

Building blocks of a successful offshore RPO relationship

• Get executive buy in: Any outsourcing decision impacts the organization. When you decide to outsource some or all of your recruitment functions, you must make sure there is a top executive who wants this initiative to succeed.
• SLAs and Deliverables: Establish clear SLAs that establish services requirements and key deliverables. Vendors adhering to a strict set of SLA's with clear process guidelines, targets and QA procedures should remove the majority of service a delivery uncertainties.
• Assign a dedicated executive: Depending on the amount of work offshored, you need to have someone from your firm dedicated, full time or part time, into managing the relationships with the vendor. The vendor should know who to go to in case they have a problem.
• Contracts: A lot of people I meet with say "offshoring is too difficult" or "offshoring doesn't work". A large portion of "reasons for failure" for offshoring can be avoided with strong contracts between the client and vendor. However, one word of caution here- the state of local laws in some of the offshore countries is abysmal so pursuing contract grievances against vendors that are solely based in an offshore location is a nightmare. Look for companies that have US presence.
• Communication channels: You need to have a clear communication channel for work to flow between the vendor firm and yours and vice versa. Make sure you have the escalation procedures in place in case deliverables get delayed.
• Be patient: Don't look for offshoring to secure a quick win- offshoring has to be a long term strategy. It is like a new team you have added thousands of miles away- no matter how good they are, they will take a little time to understand your business, your company culture, the way you interact with your candidates, your clients and your employees.

Implementing a successful outsourcing program is usually a complex process but when managed correctly, will yield major rewards and ROI.

Authored by: RadixThink (www.radixthink.com)

What Does chinzman from globalsrvcs Say on oRPO

In responding to some articles on all corner of mass media disclosing the secrets of Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) business which is currently booming. I totally agree that this is a new "baby" booming business. It is reasonable, since there are more and more facilities supporting the operation of this service.
I have a story about a successful oRPO business company which is growing fast in Bali Indonesia. Many people and investors are pessimistic in doing this kind of business in developing countries especially, country with geographic location in which lots of natural diasters happening frequently. This is a real story I have ever heard. It was unbelievable when I had holiday and spent several hours talking with the RPO director in terms of his successful RPO business. High speed internet connection with Vip enables him and his expert staff communicate with all the Big 4 and the Big 5 clients in the USA. Working offshore from the distance and remote are like Bali is really odds for everyone but that it is.The result is really onside. Even much better those who doing the same business onsite. Form this point, I think REPO business in more effective done in the developing countries and Indonesia is the best place for this business since the infrastructure is getting better and manpower is liable, qualified and negotiable in terms of compensation.
If you want to dig more information this business possibilities in Indonesia, you may visit www.globalsrvcs.com or email: chinzmanglobalsrvcs.com

Offshore Recruitment Process outsourcing will underpin growth in 2007 - InterSect

Staffing Services PLC has today launched a trial which will see its InterSelect business ‘offshore’ part of its talent management to OS2i in Pune, India.

"Offshore RPO is not a new concept," said Tyler Evans, Managing Director of Staffing Services. "As a business we have been watching it closely to see where we can utilise it to cut our fee earners non-core activities.

"We have selected OS2i, the leader in oRPO to undertake our candidate search function at their facility in Pune, India. It is anticipated this will save up to 4 hours per fee earner per day in screening CV’s for suitability."

Nick Davenport of OS2i commented, “OS2i took the bold step of pioneering Offshore Recruitment Process Outsourcing oRPO over 4 years ago and since then has continually refined and expanded the services we offer. We are excited about this new partnership with InterSelect and are looking forward to becoming an integrated part of their resourcing solution.”

Initially InterSelect will be offshoring 25% of its talent management function. Subject to successful results, the firm will seek to outsource 100% of its talent function to OS2i to include candidate searching, name gathering, vacancy management and non core recruitment administration activities.

The Science of Recruiting

Hie Friends,

I am sending you few details which I gathered related to recruitement process which can be helpful in process.

The Science of Recruiting – Part 1: Making First Contact

The Science of Recruiting. Over the next ten weeks, we'll look at every skill and technique necessary to be a great recruiter. At the end of it all, you'll have a sense of what you need to do to take your performance and success as a recruiter up another notch or two, or maybe more.

Recruiting is a multi-phase process that leads to the discovery of a perfect job match. It starts with an intricate knowledge of what the job requires. Finding top candidates is another part of this process, and is assessing candidate competency. Interspersed throughout these activities is the recruiting, convincing, and influencing part. Recruiting isn't heavy-handed, in-your-face selling, it's finesse. It's about convincing top candidates to stay involved even though their kids don't want to move. It's about convincing a hiring manager to see a top person even though he or she doesn't have all of the experience that had been originally demanded. Recruiting is about taking a fuzzy, imperfect, human process and using it to find and place perfect candidates. The profession of recruiting will always be a bit of a black art, but in the effort to make hiring top people a systematic business process, trying to find science where we can will most certainly be a useful effort.

The Basic Recruiting Process

We all know that the best candidates are more discriminating and therefore have more concerns, have more opportunities, need more information, and require more hand-holding. The ability to hire top people correlates directly with a recruiter's ability to provide this information in a professional manner.

This first Science of Recruiting article will provide recruiters with the tools they need to do just that.

As many of you know I divide the recruiting process into four primary areas

Candidate Development - all sourcing activity(except for networking) Processing - processing of resumes, care and feeding of tracking system, administrative tasks Red Zone - working one-on-one with strong candidates and hiring managers, taking the search assignment, assessing and presenting candidates, networking End Zone - negotiating and closing offers.

It is my opinion that hiring top people requires exceptional one-on-one skills, in the Red Zone and the End Zone. Administrative processing should be minimized, and some of the initial sourcing activity should be assigned to a research group if possible.

Recruiters need to proactively minimize administrative work and organize their daily activities to be in constant phone contact with top candidates. How well this is done will determine a recruiter's personal success. The Science of Recruiting articles describes how best to do this. Here are the core topics we'll be discussing during this series:

The Science of Recruiting – Key Topics

1. How to Make First Contact with a Top Person - Engage 1st, Network 2nd 2. The Art of Networking - The Difference Between Good, and Great Recruiters 3. Overcoming Basic Candidate Concerns 4. Overcoming More Serious Candidate Concerns 5. Addressing Mid-stage Candidate Concerns 6. Influencing Hiring Managers - Taking the Assignment 7. Influencing Hiring Managers - Presenting Candidates 8. Influencing Hiring Managers - The Hiring Decision 9. Negotiating and Closing Offers - The Set-up 10. Negotiating and Closing Offers - Testing and Closing

So, let's get started. In this first session we'll describe how to make first contact with a top person.

A top person can be an active candidate who is exceptionally well-qualified, or a referred candidate whom you know little about, other than that the person is well-qualified. Well-qualified people always have multiple opportunities, so how you first approach them is critical. Two basic ground rules of good recruiting apply at this initial stage.

Recruiting Ground Rule #1: Only talk to pre-qualified candidates.

Recruiters don't have time to talk to marginal candidates. To minimize time spent on unqualified candidates you must pre-qualify everyone before you ever look at their resumes, or call them on the phone.

Finding top candidates on job boards takes too much work, that's one of the reasons I don't think much time should be spent using this channel. Done correctly, networking with top employees and other highly referred candidates offers a much better return on your time investment. Make sure that every time someone like this gives you a name, you have the referrer describe why the person is strong. By making sure you only talk with qualified people, and minimizing time spent talking to unqualified candidates, you can dramatically improve your personal productivity.

Recruiting Ground Rule #2: You must get 99% of all candidates to say "Yes" when you first call.

Even if you pre-qualify everyone before you call them, about 90% of the time the person will still not be a candidate for the current job. (That's 1 in 10 success odds. If the person is not pre-qualified your success rate drops to about 1 in 100.) However, about 50% of the time the person will be well-qualified for some other current or future position, or personally know someone who is qualified for your current position. So this is still a very valuable person, and when you first call, you must make sure that the candidate doesn't say "I'm not interested," too soon. It's best to call the person assuming they could be a potential candidate, rather than the common indirect technique many recruiters use. You'll have more leverage this way if you do it right. That's why the concept of Engage 1st, Network 2nd, is so important to follow.

Your opening pitch is critical to pulling this off.

You need to delay the candidate's yes/no decision by 5-10 minutes to establish your level of professionalism. This gives you the chance to maximize your networking effectiveness.

Here's a pitch we've used with great success in training some top corporate and external recruiters.

Try this out the next time you cold-call a candidate.

"Hi, my name is _______________. I'm a recruiter with ______________. Your name got brought to my attention as someone I should connect with for a senior level search effort in (marketing, etc.) I'm leading. Before I get into any details, let me ask you a very basic

question: If the assignment I'm working on was clearly superior to what you're doing today, would you at least be open to exploring it?"

It's hard to say no to this type of call. 90% of the time the candidate will say yes. Once a candidate says yes, most recruiters then go into sales mode telling the candidate all of the details of the job. Don't do this ever again! Instead, say –

"Great. Let me first obtain a quick two-minute profile of your background, and then I'll give you the two-minute overview of the job. If it makes mutual sense to pursue the job, we'll set up some time to get into a more in-depth discussion."

We'll discuss how to address the reluctant candidate later in this series, but for now assume the person agrees to move forward. If you sound confident and professional, about 90% of the people will follow your direction without hesitating. The key to "engage 1st, network 2nd" is to be vague about the job title (e.g., a senior level position), and get the person to describe their background before the person knows much about the job. Once a candidate says "yes" to the above question, the recruiter is in a stronger position. The candidate now views the recruiter as someone who might have the key to a better job. If the candidate learns about the job details too soon, and is uninterested, the recruiter has lost this leverage.

Since there's only a 10% chance the candidate will be viable for the current job, but a 50% chance they know someone, you want to maximize your chance to network with this person. You do this by peaking their interest in the job, and then obtaining their profile.

This takes at least five minutes. If you come across as a professional, and even if the candidate is not qualified for the current opening, you'll then have a strong chance to network with the person and obtain some great leads.

You'll learn how to obtain some good names in the next session, but for now practice this pitch until it becomes automatic. Reveal as little as possible about your current opening until after you have learned the candidate's qualifications. This way the recruiter makes the decision to go forward, not the candidate.

Being a good recruiter starts by staying in control of the hiring process. This begins the moment you get the pre-qualified candidate on get on the phone.

Unfortunately, for too many recruiters, this is also where it ends.

Next week in the Science of Recruiting, we'll get into the keys to networking. Until then, good luck.

If you like what you've read above, you can learn more in Os2i Certification. You can contact me on tihsur@gmail.com for more details

I hope you would have liked the documentation.

I would appreciate if you can reply with your feedbacks and warm concerns.

Thanking You,

With Best Personal Regards.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) - on Boom

If you are interested in reducing your cost per hire, time to hire and attracting the best talent available, then Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is definitely worth considering.

WHAT IS RPO?

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) refers to a company outsourcing its recruitment or staffing process to an external service provider? The external provider shall provide your company with the necessary skills, tools and technologies to perform the recruiting function. Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) will bring in significant COST savings and improvements in the QUALITY of recruitment.

PURPOSE AND BENEFITS

Recruitment Process Outsourcing provides excellent benefits in the areas of Quality, Cost, Service and Speed.

QUALITY: Recruitment is a labor-intensive process and it is further compounded by the fact that it is recurring. To cite an example, your company could have a very high number of open positions during a certain time of the year each requiring varied skill-sets and experience. To hire a team that is capable of sourcing and recruiting these candidates is very challenging. Providers of Recruitment Process Outsourcing have the required processes in place, expertise, an extensive database of resumes and the networking required to source all types of candidates.

COST: Your costs can be significantly reduced because an RPO provider essentially uses economies of scale? They are also capable of handling volume fluctuations in a much easier way. For example, the RPO provider could allocate 10 recruiters to your company when volumes are high and then easily shift them to another client when volumes are low. If you as a company were to hire these 10 recruiters, you would either be forced to pay for resources that are not being used or lay them off which involves overhead expenses.

SERVICE: A Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider will help to streamline your companys recruitment function and make it seamless and effective. RPO providers are equipped to provide you with the best people when you need them and also take care of your ongoing and future needs through greater employee retention and process control.

SPEED: Time to hire?is a very critical factor in the recruitment process as this directly affects business performance. A Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider will find it much easier to analyze their database and create a pool of candidates that is ready to be interviewed. They need not take time to advertise for the specific job profile.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing is an end-end function. It begins all the way from designing a job profile to charting the recruitment process and also developing orientation strategies once a candidate is hired. It is not just restricted to hiring a specific person for a specific profile at any time. It is about building a talent pool of resources that can be made accessible for your company. RPO providers also go the extra mile to provide your company with valuable advice and strategies on employee retention.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing has a powerful place in the market. RPO providers are well connected to various companies and the job seeker market. They have a much larger and attractive talent pool than any single company could possibly have

The Next Big Thing - Recruitment Process Outsourcing

Source: Nasscom

In recent times, corporate India has been crying hoarse about the “Talent Crunch” and the “War For Talent” and not without good reasons.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing is in direct response to this rising need in the industry. According to Vipul Prakash, Partner, Elixir web Solutions, an end-to-end RPO company in India, “RPO is a strategic business initiative, which improves a company’s ability in many aspects. It helps to attract, acquire, and deploy talent by bringing specialized expertise, improved focus and proven best practices to the company.” Raghuveer Sakuru, managing Director of Kenexa technologies, one of the earliest players in the RPO space, says, “The RPO segment, although still in its infancy in India, is growing rapidly. The Indian economy is seeing shortages of R&D personnel in the automotive industry, middle and senior management personnel, engineers, MBAs in niche industries such as Biotech and IT product development, and English-speaking employees for retail and call center jobs. A well planned RPO process can go a long way towards filling this void.”

Current scenario in India
Vipul Prakash of Elixir quotes the Gartner estimates of the growth of the global HRO market to $80 billion by 2008. Given the break up of the HRO pie along the different offerings, he estimates that the RPO industry in India today could well be a mammoth INR 2000 crores.

HRO Functions	Percentage Contribution
Payroll	40%
Compensation & Benefits	5%
Performance Management	5%
Training	15%

Enabling the RPO process
RPO firms have responded to the increased demands placed on them with great élan in terms of striving to provide a holistic solution to their clients. According to Asim Handa, Country Leader, Futurestep India, a global RPO firm, “RPO involves conducting a complete due diligence exercise on the client company covering their current processes, hiring practices, vendors they work with etc. this due diligence exercise takes 3-4 weeks. Subsequently, we look at the entire restructuring/remodeling of the company’s processes to make them far more efficient using proprietary software / technology. This process takes another 3-4 weeks. So, the entire process to develop an effective and efficient setup takes around 6-8 weeks, post which the actual business of hiring the right talent starts.

Spectrum of Offering
This has presented unique challenges to the complete that offer RPO solutions. Firstly, they have to battle the popular notion that RPO is synonymous with an executive search process. The realization that RPO is all that and a whole lot more is slowly but surely dawning upon the HR departments of various companies. A look at the typical functions that a RPO firm would provide to its clients is a testimonial to the maturity that the offering is fast achieving.

Spectrum of services provided by RPO firms
»	Staffing department management services
»	On-site staffing professional support
»	Multi-channel sourcing strategy development and execution
»	Employee referral program administration
»	Process consulting & design
»	Direct recruiting services
»	Vendor management for advertising, employment and facilitation
»	Talent management/applicant tracking system
»	Behavioural & trait based pre-employment assessment
»	Skills based pre-employment assessment
»	Employee engagement measurement and retention consulting
»	Full report package & ROI measurement

Key Benefits from an RPO Engagement
Besides the obvious advantage of feeling up time in the HR department and the engagement of a specialist for the job, some of the key benefits that clients of RPO firms have come to see are:

Streamlined Recruitment Process
»	Reduced operational coats of talent acquisition
»	Increased talent levels and consistency
»	Expedited time to market of project teams ensuring timely deployable resources
»	Established process to achieve repeatable results
»	Measurement and tracking of effectiveness of assessment process and quality of hires towards greater accuracy in forecasting
»	Accountable and tracking of effectiveness of assessment process and quality of hires towards greater accuracy in forecasting
»	Create a variable cost structure for the recruitment function

Most vendors claim that they can help their clients achieve 15%-20% returns on their investment in RPO. This would of course be over and above the other significant benefits mentioned above.

The Indian RPO story is just beginning to emerge if global trends are anything to go by. This is the reason that almost all the global majors in this arena like, Futurestep, the RPO subsidiary of Korn/Ferry international, Manpower Inc, Adecco, Kenexa, Talent Fusion, Spherion, Os2i have made a beeline for India.

“Gartner estimates the growth of the global HRO market to $80 billion by 2008”

“Most vendors claim that they can help their clients achieve 15%-20% returns on their investment in RPO”

India: Recruitment Process Outsourcing to witness a big rise

With the country undoubtedly set to experience a talent shortage of around half million people in the next few years, there is one industry which is all set to cash on the scarcity of manpower. This is the industry which is going to give the crying managers from all verticals a solution so that they can fill manpower target within due time. This newly dawned sector is called-Recruitment Process Outsourcing or RPO. The sector looks promising and with emergence of labor intensive sectors like retailing and IT, the need for competent players (that is RPO) will increase over time.

A conservative estimate by one research firm states that the Indian market is valued not less than $200, 000,000. So, this can very well be measured as the prospective size of the RPO business in the country, which is actually a subset of human resource outsourcing (HRO) market.

It is understood that approximately 80% of the HR personnel are mostly engaged in direct recruitment processes and do not able to do justice to other so called core areas like HR activities which includes training, staffing needs, ensuring performance etc. Here, RPO comes into the picture which takes some of the recruitment headache and thus saves time and cost of companies to large extent.

Recruitment process outsourcing/offshoring rolls

This new theme on the block is called…. recruitment process outsourcing or RPO. Now, if some one asks what is actually recruitment process outsourcing, you can answer him straight, without much scratching your head. Again it’s a back end work but seems like some brains will be also needed. Read this:

Recruiters have to do a lot of back-end activities like searching for candidates from database and job boards, testing their skills, checking their backgrounds, testing them for drugs, screening their resumes, etc. Companies have now begun to outsource these back-end tasks to third parties — and this process has been grandly christened, like many before it, as Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO). RPO is also known as Employment Process Outsourcing.

The benefits:

1. Reduces the cost of operations
2. Increases the speed of recruitment
3. Frees up HR managers from back-end sourcing tasks.

Thus being saved 60% of the time. From chaffing through ton of resumes from inboxes, finding right profiles from job boards or data banks. So, a RPO, probably based in Bulgaria, Costa Rica or India will free up managers from such mundane tasks.

The worldwide HR market is big. Consider this

The worldwide HR outsourcing market is expected to hit $80 billion by 2008, and RPO, its sub component, will be worth $30 billion, according to Kelly HRfirst, a subsidiary of Kelly Services and one of the largest global RPO players. Another large RPO player is Kenexa.