Why bother with Recruitment Process Outsourcing? (Vol II)

I’m a niche recruiter; I just call the client direct.

While your client is taking their first steps towards going down the MSP route, you may well find the back-door remains open for a while.  There is likely to be plenty of resistance from the hiring managers who all have their favourite recruiters on tap, but the benefits of RPO/MSP is one of streamlined efficiencies and a reduction in cost to the business, it’s not designed to make your life easier – but it might well do exactly that. 

Why bother with Recruitment Process Outsourcing? Because it could be your best advert.

“My margins are being squeezed so much it’s not worth it”.  Yes, that may be true, but before we take on this hot potato, let’s look from the client’s point of view...

Let’s imagine you’re the HR Director for a 500 employee business.  Your staff turnover is running at 15% pa, your business is expanding at 20% pa and you’re dealing with 25 agencies on the preferred suppliers list.  The maths is scary.

1. 175 placements to fill a year (200 with the ‘no-shows)
2. 2000 interviews?
3. 10,000 CV’s?
4. 30,000 calls and emails?

Now lets imagine you’ve just been told to slash the agency spend by 50%.  What are your options? 

It shouldn’t be a big job.

Ok, let me clarify.  If you live in a world where you managed to programme the Sky remote to adjust the sound on your TV, and you single-handedly managed to move your itunes from one ipod to another – you probably don’t need as much training as me!

Recruiters are most commonly described as ‘sales types’, and these types tend to be people who benefit from guided help in bite sized pieces, or a training session with a specific agenda (huge generalisation I know)!.

Yesterday I was told, “Software makes Recruitment more complicated, not easier” and you know what, for some recruiters out there, you might be right.

As an ex-recruiter I’ve seen the market move from boxes of cards to DOS based solutions and right now in my experience users tend to favour functionally rich, fast Windows-based applications. But all the benefits of hosted solutions are hard to ignore.