One thing I’ve NEVER enjoyed about HR is recruiting. It may surprise some readers that I say this, based on the large volume of recruiting services I provide in addition to resume writing. The fact is, as an HR Executive recruiting was always one of the biggest needs of every organization I was involved in. As a support center, my job was to make it possible for operations to do their job effectively, and to do that they needed quality staff. It is not the best use of managers’ time to source candidates, screen resumes, arrange interviews, etc. The problem was, as an HR leader I had a lot of strategic things to do; compensation bands, review processes, leadership training, employee investigations (sigh) and I simply didn’t have the industry contacts to develop or maintain the pipeline of candidates I needed for rapid growth.
The only options I knew of at the time were to use staffing agencies (who’d ask for 25% to 30% of first year’s pay), temp-to-hire (with extremely high hourly resource rates and/or contract buy-outs) or to staff an in-house recruiting team, with the associated labor costs, benefits, applicant tracking systems (HUGE cost), career fairs, marketing collateral etc. No matter which way I sliced it, finding talent for my organizations was expensive, time consuming and priority-sucking. But organizations ARE people, and so people-finding is always needed.
If I thought my recruiting days were over when I left corporate HR I had another think coming! No matter who my clients are, at one point every one of them has needed my help recruiting. As an outsource recruiter I have a lot to recommend me – I’m ridiculously cheap based on my model and overhead, I’m an awesome interviewer and I have an instinct for understanding what it takes to be successful and how to find out which candidates are good matches for my clients. With all that being said, I am a boutique agent at best and despite some success I still remain loyal to my core business model – which is to work with business owners and leaders to help them love their businesses again. While I LOVE coaching and leadership development, recruiting is always there, needing to be attended to before the fun can start.
Which is why I am totally in love with the Recruiting Process Outsourcing (RPO) model! Imagine if there was a company who could take as MUCH of your recruiting process as you wanted off your plate? Well there IS! We’re talking job posting, social media engagement, branding, job fairs, applicant tracking, resume screening, pre-qualifying and with the economies of scale to have robust pipelines in most industries/positions. It’s so streamlined and so efficient it’s almost unbelievable!
The RPO model really works best for companies who have high volumes of staffing needs, by which I mean if you hire about 10 people a month or more, because that’s where the economies of scale make sense. Less than that and you’re probably served just fine with me or someone like me, or your HR staff doing your recruiting. But if you’re spending anywhere like $150,000 a year on recruiting this is almost certainly the solution for you. I know in my last job I was spending easily $200,000 just on recruiters, not to mention my ATS, occasional headhunters, ads, etc. When I look at the money I could have saved with an RPO model I….well, that’s all in the past now. If you’re in HR and are struggling to fill 10 or more spots a week, you can probably save your company significant money, too. It’s worth looking into…if you’d like to know more let me know. As you can tell, I LOVE to talk about this!
So take recruiting off your plate and load it up with all the things you’re really passionate about!
