Decide if recruitment outsourcing is right for you

Citation

Leggett, R. (2008), "Decide if recruitment outsourcing is right for you", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 7 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/shr.2008.37207aaf.003

Decide if recruitment outsourcing is right for you

Decide if recruitment outsourcing is right for you

Practical advice for HR professionals

Robert Leggett, MD of Omni Resource Management Solutions, highlights the key considerations involved in recruitment outsourcing.

Pioneered by the large corporate sector, recruitment outsourcing is now a fast-growing area in many markets. With a supplier base capable of providing a viable outsourcing service, even for modest volumes of recruitment, the key benefits now available to many organizations include reducing or refocusing the people involved in the process and improving cost efficiency. Because recruitment is awash with low-value, highly administrative tasks, it lends itself particularly well to outsourcing.

But how do you decide whether or not recruitment outsourcing is right for your organization? The following five points offer considerations around which the key elements of good recruitment outsourcing are based. Whether you are considering recruitment outsourcing or not, it is worth putting some time aside to review these points and consider whether you could be doing anything better.

Step 1. Putting in place a clear strategy

We all agree that recruitment and HR are a vital part of any organization, yet they are often areas where putting a real strategy in place is overlooked. A solid and intelligent recruitment strategy that ties in with the organization’s overall strategy is essential, as it makes it so much easier to get management buy-in to the recruitment process and to add maximum value. Responsibility for recruitment is something that is easy to pass around, causing bottlenecks that can damage your brand as well as alienate potential new employees. It is easy to assume that everyone is clear on their responsibilities, but this assumption can prove a costly one.

Step 2. Focusing on the value-adding tasks

If your recruitment is high-volume, ongoing or specialist across a wide spectrum, or there is a lack of time and experience to manage recruitment in-house, then you could be ready to consider recruitment outsourcing. This removes the non-value-added tasks from HR staff, allowing the in-house team to concentrate on strategy, candidate selection and staff retention. Consider whether or not you are utilizing existing members of staff and the referrals they can provide? Increasing vacancy visibility across the organization will encourage internal moves and in this way help retain experience and talent.

Step 3. Defining a formal recruitment process

Having formal procedures in place ensures that candidates receive the same experience of your organization. Without this, you are likely to have wide variations on the most successful hiring methods and the quality of hires. Defining, developing and managing a formal recruitment process is time-consuming, but it delivers strong advantages. Different roles require different tools to assess competence; an interview may be adequate for some positions, while others may benefit from formal assessments such as psychometric testing. A person with interviewing experience is not necessarily an effective interviewer. These variances, plus candidates’ perspectives, need to be considered when creating a formal process.

Step 4. Increasing agency commitment

While it is healthy to reduce dependency on recruitment agencies, well-defined preferred suppliers can be an integral part of finding the right candidates. Understanding suppliers’ needs properly and working with them to deliver the right people is key. They should feel like partners in filling the roles you need them to, which will increase their commitment. Only with formal measures in place can organizations properly assess recruitment performance. Key performance indicators (KPIs) should be defined and external providers should operate to standard service level agreements linked to those KPIs. Do not base your recruitment decisions on instinct and hearsay; assess your system’s performance.

Step 5. Gathering feedback for improvement

The time spent gathering recruitment information for management and board meetings is probably longer than you would like to spend, but without this data, such as average cost per hire, average time to hire, best-performing advertising media and supplier performance, it is very difficult to make long-term improvements to your recruitment processes. It is so important that you know how your recruitment processes are perceived by everyone involved in them, and the 360-degree review is the ideal mechanism for gathering this feedback. A few well-designed questionnaires are all it takes – once you have the information, you can start analyzing and finding ways to improve your recruitment process.