As the talent war rages and emerging economies join the fray, organizations see outsourcing non-core activities that are not proprietary or essential to their strategic advantage, as the only way forward. And much of this activity has gone offshore. While reducing costs and increasing the availability of talent, offshoring has brought its own share of challenges. Among these is establishing an effective recruiting and hiring network across cultures so as to maintain quality standards in their workforce globally. Therefore, recruitment too has been outsourced to recruitment process outsourcing providers who take responsibility for all permanent and contingent staff recruiting requirements of organizations. This is gradually moving offshore as well, and rightly so. As organizations turn truly global, they have begun to look for RPO providers who not only recruit candidates for local operations, but across its offices in various parts of the world. In other words, they have begun to differentiate between vanilla RPO providers and those who can partner with them in their global recruitment strategy. Indeed, organizations realize the need for Global RPO ‘partners’.
The Need for a Global RPO Model
Today, there is a need to find talent across borders and establish a dependable and steady source of expertise for specific positions or job categories. Many organizations that lack the internal resources to assemble talent quickly and seamlessly are turning to RPO to fashion management teams or specialized project teams so that they can achieve performance-driven growth.
Taking the case of continental Europe, where countries have been slower to adopt solutions such as RPO than their counterparts in the U.S. and U.K, it is evident that organizations have begun to feel the heat from competition. In today’s environment, where human capital separates winners from losers, the need for strategic hiring has led several organizations to rethink their plans. It is important to point out that RPO isn’t just another form of outsourcing. It provides great financial return and performance enhancement when used as a quality initiative—with the goal of efficiently locating and retaining the best talent.
More than anything else, RPO brings forth measurable and definable standards. Rather than a company or HR department losing control, which is a common misconception about recruitment process outsourcing, organizations actually gain greater control over their recruitment processes. With established qualitative and quantitative metrics up front, it’s possible to monitor decisions and hiring methods and adapt as needed. And apart from reducing the direct costs associated with global hiring, RPO helps to maximize investments and results.
The issue of debate is not ‘if’ but ‘how soon’ RPO will move from being a country specific service to a truly global service. The majority of RPO providers are bracing themselves for the challenges of doing full service RPO (geographically and functionally).
The ‘Must-Haves’ for Global RPO Partners
So, what is needed to enable a truly global deal and, more importantly, ensure it is sustainable? The solution hinges on three key aspects:
· Technology
· Pre-existing bandwidth
· Continued innovation in strategy
The single biggest factor for the successes in the market today is enabling technologies. Attempting to implement global RPO without a well-designed and implemented enterprise RPO solution is impossible.
Secondly, the RPO provider must have the pre-existing bandwidth to meet the demands of clients across geographies. Although one always needs local experts to support the peculiarities of different geographies, it is important to have a global approach to delivery. A properly deployed offshore RPO strategy benefits companies by increasing the quality of their search through a combination of technology and expanded manpower to each job search. The ultimate goal is to find the best candidate available for each job, which is accomplished by sifting through a plethora of candidate choices. This model works for temporary staffing as well as permanent hires. By selecting an RPO partner with a global delivery network, companies are able to find not only the best talent locally, but talent which exists in other regions of the world. It is especially important to work with a partner who has an advanced visa immigration department, to alleviate any challenges to the importation of talent.
In order to elucidate the innovation aspect, it is appropriate to look at the example of a Sourcer-model devised by RPOworldwide. Online recruiting and globalization have opened up the market like never before. Successful online recruitment requires capabilities in sophisticated Boolean search strings, knowledge on how to refine job searches, and the knowledge on how to get to the smallest number of candidates with the best fit for the job, minimizing search time. No matter how effective a company is at these searches, the number of candidates required to screen in order to find someone that can fill a position is significantly greater than in the past. This has created an explosion in the amount of manpower needed to contact and recruit these candidates. This has led to the need for a new role, which we call a candidate sourcer.
These individuals specialize on the initial search and screening of candidates from job boards but stop short of actually completing full recruitment. The role of a sourcer is to help sift and funnel down to a smaller pool of candidates, which can be handed to a recruiter. It is necessary to sell the position to the candidate/prospective employee, understand the needs of the candidate/prospective employee, and in the case of a staffing company, communicate with the customer. The sourcing model maximizes the efficiency of the recruiters. This is a must-have role, for without sourcers, staffing companies need to expand the number of recruiters they have, which is not cost-effective. How do you afford to expand when at the same time customers are looking to compress the margins that you make on the business? It is possible through offshore RPO, and through a Sourcing model. One of the most significant advantages of an offshore RPO model, which incorporates sourcers is the ability to have 24x7x365 coverage of resume searches, given the time-zone differences across the globe. While the U.S. sleeps at night, sourcers in locations abroad scour job boards for candidates, giving U.S. companies a headstart the next morning.
Companies that adopt this innovative strategy, and begin partnering with global providers of these services will prosper.
RPO – A Continued Long-term Engagement
Organizations need to keep in mind that RPO is no stopgap answer to their recruitment woes. RPO is most effective when it’s part of a broad strategy to find talent where it resides—regardless of geography. Organizations in the U.S.A. have been the frontrunners in adopting an RPO-based recruiting model. Although the largest European corporations have understood this concept, many medium-size and smaller companies in the EU are only beginning to recognize how RPO fits into a global growth strategy and its positive impact on various divisions and departments, including IT, finance, operations, marketing and sales.
Another advantage of RPO is that it helps deliver consistent messaging to candidates across the world. An effective campaign can improve or solidify a company’s image and appeal by creating consistent marketing and advertising messages—ensuring that all candidates receive the appropriate message. This bears special significance for organizations functioning across the European Union where consistent messaging remains a challenge. Numerous languages and ongoing cultural differences drastically affect the way candidates view and interpret messages.
Organizations considering RPO should weigh their options carefully—especially as demand for talent heats up across the globe. Executives should understand their company’s needs, goals, opportunities and risks and search for a partner that is able to provide maximum value and global capabilities. At the same time, they must work with their chosen provider to clearly define their quality standards, search metrics, completion metrics and financial analysis methods and ensure that there is continuous communication throughout an RPO engagement. This is essential for the success of the RPO-based model of recruitment for any multinational organization.
Note: The author is the CEO of RPOworldwide.Participation in or using information posted in this article is subject to the following disclaimer.
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