The benefits offered by recruitment process outsourcing are numerous, but
companies and recruitment firms must work together for maximum effect.
HIRING
VIKAS SETHIA, QUESS CORP
A win-win
collaboration
E
very organisation has a unique DNA,
characterised and represented by its people.
In a growing and diverse economy like India,
it is interesting to see the versatility of our
people who can moderate themselves to
not only fit into roles with large MNCs and
mid-sized companies but also challenge
themselves to join the dreams of some quite unusual startup
ideas—brewed during endless brainstorming sessions and
scribbled on cafe napkins.
Recruiting is amongst the brightest stars in the galaxy of
organisational functions. Once a next-door placement agency
task, it has evolved through a series of needs, techniques,
strategies, and innovative methodologies; and now RPO
has gained prominence in the minds of every HR personnel
and business stakeholder. The availability of the right talent
at the right time has become a key success driver for every
business plan.
Organisations today believe in staying lean, yet require
the agility and preparedness needed to achieve on-demand
availability of an extremely diverse and multiskilled workforce.
With roles starting to being framed around some sharp KRAs
and KPIs, it has become imminent to run an equally efficient
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RPO partnerships have
ensured that external
hiring teams are not only
equipped with access to
company information,
but also exposed to its
cultural legacy.
©shutterstock.com
and robust hiring process.
While some organisations have
attempted to build and manage
their own processes—focusing on
manpower planning, turnaround
time (TAT), quality of hires, and
the inevitable cost per hire—
there is also an emerging trend
of outsourcing in anticipation
of best practices or addressing
an unsaid intent of handing
over some tedious and uninteresting scope of the
recruiting workflow.
RPO discussions are not without flavours: right
from hiring en masse (sales roles in BFSI or vanilla
skills in IT and ITES) to hiring cross-functional
teams for greenfield and brownfield projects, to
(most commonly) hiring round the year as an
extended yet integrated arm of the company’s HR
function. RPO programmes have demonstrated
some quite attractive propositions when rolled
out with well-defined and measurable objectives.
And it is perfectly okay for these objectives to
vary—both in size and priority—from organisation
to organisation.
For decades, the recruiting industry has been
skimming professional fees—ranging from 30-90
days of the selected candidate’s salary which is
8.33% of CTC and onwards. This was coupled with
organisations being serviced by an endless count
of recruiting partners, and HR managers finding
it difficult to manage them. It soon turned into
mutual interest to park hiring requirements with a
few select partners. For organisations, it not only
ensured greater service attention and quality but
also raw negotiating power. For recruitment firms,
it helped in developing key account relationships
and channelising efforts into more result-oriented
hiring, with minimum pilferage of the candidate
pipeline. This win-win collaboration slowly turned
into a more evolved programme that we now call
RPO. Recruiting firms today are globally integrated
and hence have the ability to manage global hiring
programmes for clients.
RPO partnerships have ensured that the external
hiring teams are not only equipped with elaborate
access to company and role information, but
also exposed to its cultural legacy that helps in
evaluating and hiring best-fit and steady-tenure
candidates. Talent acquisition teams are faced with
another challenge of keeping costs in control. To
achieve this, firms are strategising a channel mix
of hiring through external partners and internal
channels like internal job postings, employee
referrals, campus placements, social media tools,
etc. Internal channel is yet another outsourced
RPO proposition, and offsets the relatively high
cost of the direct-sourcing partner channel, thus
optimising overall hiring costs. It also disallows any
skewed pattern of talent that external channels may
be feeding into the organisation. Internal channels
are also receiving greater attention and preference
since they establish natural connect with existing
employees and contribute favourably to employee
engagement and attrition rates.
Every RPO pitch starts with an introduction
meeting and a series of capability presentations.
While these presentations are getting increasingly
impressive by the day, it is important for
organisations to conduct uncompromising due
diligence. Many clues can be picked up when
the partners present their understanding of
the client’s need along with recommended
©shutterstock.com
HIRING
The success of RPO
partnerships rests with
the quality of process
design and a sustained
implementation
plan throughout the
programme tenure.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vikas Sethia is
Head - Excellence
and Sustainability
Programs, Quess
Corp Limited.
solutions. Companies should
ensure that the RPO solution
vividly demonstrates the
implementation preparedness
in line with their planned hiring
objectives, and is commercially
feasible too. It is not uncommon
to seek at least two to three
professional client references
before a final sign-off.
Recruitment firms likewise are advised to ask
questions that help in understanding the client’s
hiring plan, current processes, challenges, and
SLA (service-level agreement) expectations.
It may be important to discuss and moderate
unreasonable expectations, if any. These firms
quite often get complacent in anticipation of a
key account sign-off, and tend to unduly agree
to all the deliverables proposed. There is a good
chance that such partnerships eventually face
SLA gaps and break up early. They also need
to exercise caution with RPO enquiries that
do not demonstrate clear objectives or any
serious thought process. These could simply be
commercial information-gathering exercises or
an attempt to evaluate RPOs because the world
around them is doing so. It is amusing to be part
of such enquiries, and nearly all such clients who
have shown haste right from the first hour never
took off with any RPO (you will hear them say
that this is most urgent, and they intend to meet
and sign- off in the next two days).
The success of RPO partnerships rests with
the quality of process design and a sustained
implementation plan throughout the programme
tenure. The size and scale of these programmes
warrant the need to capture data and run a
continuous data analytics engine to keep every
minor to major programme objective in control.
Rightful data reporting and interpretation also
ensure timely decisions across all the participants
—recruiters, HR teams, hiring managers,
candidates, etc. Stakeholder relationship is another
key driver that can keep these programmes
rolling smooth for years. RPOs are the outcome
of long-gestation evaluations and discussions,
and the interdependency between the RPO firm
and client is hence unassumingly integrated. The
choice to recruit together gets mutually stronger
with every passing year.
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