Howard Flint's Posts - RecruitingBlogs2024-03-29T01:23:23ZHoward Flinthttps://recruitingblogs.com/profile/HowardFlint962https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1527013874?profile=RESIZE_48X48&width=48&height=48&crop=1%3A1https://recruitingblogs.com/profiles/blog/feed?user=2d4jojo9v5i8y&xn_auth=noThe Four Pillars of RPO Excellence for RPO's and buyers of RPO servicestag:recruitingblogs.com,2017-02-25:502551:BlogPost:20051922017-02-25T11:43:21.000ZHoward Flinthttps://recruitingblogs.com/profile/HowardFlint962
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<h2><strong>We demand RPO Excellence!</strong></h2>
<p>When I talk to organisations looking to outsource their recruitment, the most frequent area of conversation typically revolves around this:</p>
<p><strong><em>Howard, RPO’s tell a good story, and we are pretty sure they can handle our core transactional recruitment requirement. But how can we tell a great RPO from just a good RPO? How do we make sure we choose the RPO that is really going to deliver Recruitment…</em></strong></p>
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<h2><strong>We demand RPO Excellence!</strong></h2>
<p>When I talk to organisations looking to outsource their recruitment, the most frequent area of conversation typically revolves around this:</p>
<p><strong><em>Howard, RPO’s tell a good story, and we are pretty sure they can handle our core transactional recruitment requirement. But how can we tell a great RPO from just a good RPO? How do we make sure we choose the RPO that is really going to deliver Recruitment Excellence, today and tomorrow?</em></strong></p>
<p>And I can understand their concern. The RPO market is full of very capable and competent providers, mainly focused on fantastic operational effectiveness i.e. fastest time to hire, optimum shortlist size, cheapest (direct) sourcing.</p>
<p>Some RPO’s have constructed interesting perspectives and capability in emerging areas of recruitment practice such as employer brand, candidate management, social media sourcing and assessment practices. Often these reflect current trends in the market. Much is technology led, with RPO’s dashing to find a piece of new recruitment tech that will give them an advantage over their competitors.</p>
<p>In themselves, these individual bits of capability are all good. But they can be reactive, in response to a client’s constant demand for innovation, and piecemeal, with no overarching improvement framework.</p>
<p>They don’t deliver a coherent vision of the RPO’s strategy for delivering Recruitment Excellence.</p>
<p><strong>Is our Recruitment Excellence the same as your Recruitment Excellence?</strong></p>
<p>The challenge in defining and delivering Recruitment Excellence is that an RPO’s objectives are not naturally aligned with their clients.</p>
<p>There is normally some alignment:</p>
<ul>
<li>RPO’s are primarily in business to make money for their owners by providing great transactional recruitment services in the most cost effective way possible.</li>
<li>Buyers of RPO services want an RPO provider who can provide great transactional recruitment services at a competitive price.</li>
</ul>
<p>OK so far.</p>
<p>But I have never met an intelligent RPO client that didn’t want more than that. They are not just after a competitive price – they want their RPO to provide them with real competitive advantage when it comes to staffing their companies. They want the RPO to recruit in a way that means they can change and grow easier and quicker than their competitors. They want to be able to respond to market demand and push new ideas without having to worry about whether they can get the staff they need. In other words they want the RPO to be able to give them confidence that they can <strong><em>get the best people, exactly when they want them, with minimum hassle and cost</em></strong>.</p>
<p>So Recruitment Excellence goes beyond the traditional contractual KPI’s and SLA’s, and pushes the RPO into the realms of delivering real strategic benefit to their client.</p>
<p><strong>The Four Pillars of RPO Excellence – A Client Driven Sustainable Framework For World Class RPO</strong></p>
<p><strong><img width="640" height="640" class="center" style="width: 438px; height: 439px;" alt="" src="https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAmoAAAAJDQ2NTRhOGMyLWM0NGEtNDFkYi1iZWYzLTY2ZmIzZTk5YzU0Mw.png"/></strong></p>
<p>The four Pillars that any RPO aspiring to a model of Recruitment Excellence needs to master have been defined from the perspective of a typical RPO client. In other words – what does an RPO client expect from a World Class RPO?</p>
<p>The Pillars do not focus on specific recruitment processes. Excellence in sourcing on its own for instance doesn’t imply excellence in RPO.</p>
<p>Each Pillar reflects a core strategic client need rephrased into an obligation of the RPO, and are summarised below:</p>
<p><img width="640" height="477" class="center align-center" style="width: 385px; height: 307px;" alt="" src="https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAwfAAAAJGI4ZmYxZWQ2LTY5ZWQtNDkyYy1iYTFmLWU3NTNlM2M5MGM5NQ.png"/></p>
<p>They are relevant today, and they will hold tomorrow as well. They do not change in response to trends or economic conditions. The way that an RPO needs to deliver the Pillars however will change. New technologies, changes in workforce behaviours, and different client imperatives will all influence how the Pillars are built and maintained. But the Pillars are the Pillars.</p>
<p>So let’s look at each of the Four Pillars in turn.</p>
<p><strong>Pillar 1 – Hiring Quality</strong></p>
<p><em>An unwavering data driven focus on improving both the quality of hires and the quality of the hiring process.</em></p>
<p>It is natural that the first Pillar is concerned with quality. Clients want to be sure they are seeing and then recruiting the best candidates available. However measuring and reporting on candidate quality pre and post hire is a real challenge that only the top RPO’s attempt to do – let only deliver successfully.</p>
<p>Recruitment Excellence demands a relentless evidence based approach to improving the quality of the candidates going through a recruitment process and then their performance post hire. It means that an RPO should be able to report on the strength of candidate pools they are presenting to hiring managers, and link the characteristics of successful candidates with their performance post hire.</p>
<p>This then allows them to understand the profiles of candidates that will be the most successful for their clients and feed this back into new recruitment processes.</p>
<p>Linked to this is the quality of the hiring process. World Class RPO’s will measure and assess the quality of each individual hiring process. This means recording, tracking and reporting on hiring manager requirements and expectations for each requisition. It introduces a more relevant and valuable way of understanding hiring performance than the old traditional “one size fits all” hiring KPI’s such as Average Time to Hire and Average Shortlist Size. (Have a look at the piece on traditional recruitment metrics for more information on this subject!)</p>
<p>One of the biggest challenges in this area is defining and using a common set of candidate selection and process performance criteria. Traditional ATS are not designed to measure and track hiring quality. However there are some new hiring quality platforms such as Talenytics (<a href="http://www.talenytics.com/" target="_blank">www.talenytics.com</a>) which sit alongside your ATS and focus on the quality part of the recruitment process.</p>
<p><strong>Pillar 2 –</strong> <strong>Service Efficiency & Positive Stakeholder Experience Combined</strong></p>
<p><em>The capability to deliver a highly efficient recruitment service whilst ensuring a truly positive stakeholder experience.</em></p>
<p>RPO’s face a constant balancing act between being extremely efficient, so they can keep prices low and profits high, and ensuring a high level of positive engagement with stakeholders, primarily hiring managers and candidates.</p>
<p>Recruitment Excellence demands that a World Class RPO does both. To ensure efficiency, they need to have processes, people, capability and technology that can reduce administration, eliminate errors, and increase throughput. But this needs to happen concurrently with a passionate desire to ensure the highest level of positive stakeholder engagement.</p>
<p>RPO clients do not accept that a cost efficient service should deliver substandard hiring manager or candidate engagement. Their demands in this area are if anything getting higher.</p>
<p>Balancing service efficiency with customer intimacy is really difficult to do.</p>
<p>I have personally seen the effects of an RPO cost cutting exercise on the service being delivered to a client. Their relationship didn’t last very long.</p>
<p>This is where new technology, especially in the area of AI and BOTS (e.g. <a href="http://wadeandwendy.ai/">http://wadeandwendy.ai/</a>) which can act as surrogate recruiters, will come to the fore.</p>
<p><strong>Pillar 3 – Total Workforce Management</strong></p>
<p><em>Execute the best fulfilment solution to deliver the most appropriate workforce mix</em></p>
<p>Client workforces are made up of complex arrangements of permanent employees, salaried staff on fixed term contracts, self-employed staff working on a freelance or interim basis and agency employed workers. We can then add casual staff (on zero hour contracts), bank staff, statement of work contractors, and increasingly “gig” based workers.</p>
<p>We only need to see the current debates going on about the use of agency workers in healthcare, and casual staff in warehousing and distribution to see how workforce mix can affect performance, cost and external perceptions of an organisation.</p>
<p>RPO’s on the other hand have normally grown from a core business that revolves around recruiting one employment type. For many it’s permanent salaried staff; for some it’s as master vendors of contractors or temp staff.</p>
<p>An RPO’s service delivery capability and commercial model maybe skewed to deliver a particular type of worker. An RPO with Managed Service Provider origins will be the most comfortable with recruiting an agency temp for a role through its branch network that could be better filled by a worker on a fixed term contract.</p>
<p>This is a real issue. I have direct experience of a high profile public sector call centre that was recruiting agency temps when it would have been far cheaper and more effective to have a well-managed casual seasonal bank of employees. But because the RPO core business was as a temp MSP all the focus was to source from their own temp workers.</p>
<p>A client needs an RPO who can credibly assess the best mix of workforce type, and recruit accordingly. I have seen RPO clients reduce their agency expenditure by 80% through more control of the temp process, and faster recruitment of permanent staff. And today the breadth of fulfilment capability needs to extend to work that can be best filled by “gig” type engagements and react to “uberisation” practices. But this means that the RPO has to have insight, control and confidence in all workforce employment types and a balanced commercial model that meant it was still making profit.</p>
<p><strong>Pillar 4 – Client Empathy</strong></p>
<p><em>Represent and leverage the Client’s culture, values and brand</em></p>
<p>How many times have we sat in a proposal presentation and it’s got to the bit about culture and values. The presenter then says… “Your culture and values are just like ours – that’s why we are a great fit for your organisation.”</p>
<p>My toes always curl at this point as clearly this is not going to be true. How can an RPO have the same culture and values as all of the organisations it supplies?</p>
<p>RPO’s who think they need to reproduce the culture of their clients within their own teams are aspiring to an objective that is unachievable – and probably not what their clients want anyway. Clients are buying something specific –a supplier that is ultra-focused on Recruitment Excellence, and has their own unique way of doing it.</p>
<p>World Class RPO’s are able to understand, represent and operate in a way that supports and champions client values, culture and brand – without trying to embed a replica of it within themselves. World Class RPO’s need to be chameleon-like, putting on the appearance of the client. But inside, the RPO should still have it’s own strong cultural character based on whatever works for its own success.</p>
<p>This ability to <strong><em>represent</em></strong> requires empathy with the client, i.e. a real appreciation of how the client wants to be perceived, and how to use this to be strong in areas such as employer branding, corporate social responsibility, and diversity and inclusion.</p>
<p><strong>Using the Four Pillars</strong></p>
<p>If you are an RPO leader, or a buyer of RPO, then my recommendation would be to consider your activities against these four pillars.</p>
<ul>
<li>For RPO leaders – are you confident your RPO lives up to the principles embodied in the Four Pillars?</li>
<li>For RPO buyers – to what extent does your existing or future RPO really get and grip this principle?</li>
</ul>
<p>Feel free to contact me directly if you’d like to know more about the Four Pillars.</p>RPO – Let’s not make it a race to the bottom!tag:recruitingblogs.com,2017-02-07:502551:BlogPost:20023422017-02-07T14:09:33.000ZHoward Flinthttps://recruitingblogs.com/profile/HowardFlint962
<p><em><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1557610617?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-full" height="498" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1557610617?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" style="width: 700px; height: 471px;" width="750"></img></a> RPO service providers must focus on their own unique value rather than trying to be the cheapest as they compete for new business.</em></p>
<p><strong><em>In the competitive RPO market is it all about price?</em></strong></p>
<p>I was discussing the importance of price during the sales process with some senior RPO execs the other week. It was noteworthy to me how many of…</p>
<p><em><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1557610617?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="750" height="498" class="align-full" style="width: 700px; height: 471px;" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1557610617?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024"/></a>RPO service providers must focus on their own unique value rather than trying to be the cheapest as they compete for new business.</em></p>
<p><strong><em>In the competitive RPO market is it all about price?</em></strong></p>
<p>I was discussing the importance of price during the sales process with some senior RPO execs the other week. It was noteworthy to me how many of them believed that price had to be the primary differentiator between their company and their competitors.</p>
<p>They were convinced it didn’t matter how superior their service offering was, in the end the client would choose who the RPO provider they wanted based purely on price.</p>
<p>This isn’t surprising I suppose. There are an increasing number of credible RPOs out there battling for business and the pendulum is constantly swinging in organisations between RPO and in-house recruitment models. So competition is fierce!</p>
<p>And this is not the first time I have heard and seen this. Whilst I was helping a large RPO/MSP to improve their sales performance, it became apparent that they were bidding on opportunities they would never win. This was because their primary qualification question was – “Can we deliver the service at the lowest price?” They took no account of their understanding of the need, the unique suitability of their solution, track record in delivery, or even the strength of their relationship with the prospect.</p>
<p>But RPO is a complex, people driven service. RPO is not a high volume commodity mass produced in factories. It doesn’t lend itself well to operating strategies that focus on squeezing cost out. As soon as reducing cost is the driver, we have all seen service levels quickly start to deteriorate.</p>
<p><strong><em>RPO clients want value first!</em></strong></p>
<p>RPO clients need great “value for money”, and the key word here is value. My experience is that clients are prepared to pay a premium for a service they perceive to be delivering more value than the alternatives they are looking at.</p>
<p>I don’t mean value in a strictly financial sense but value from the client perspective. In this context it means:</p>
<p>“Can the RPO provider deliver: 1. exactly what I need; 2. better than anyone else 3. at lowest risk to me? 4. And can I work with them?”</p>
<p>The RPO who has this position will be able to negotiate a fair price – certainly a better price than their competition. This will allow them in turn to deliver a great service, have a happy client, and make some commercial return.</p>
<p>I have led numerous roundtables on the subject of RPO, coaching organisations on how they should outsource their recruitment. Almost without exception they all agreed it would be better to pay a little bit more and receive a great service than to try and negotiate a supplier to a price below what is economically viable. Doing the latter will inevitably lead to a poor service, and an unhappy relationship between all!</p>
<p>We should take note of John Ruskin who said:</p>
<p>“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.”</p>
<p>Buyers get this. They understand that the lowest price won’t necessarily give them the best deal. They want value!</p>
<p><strong><em>We love you – you can do anything!</em></strong></p>
<p>The key question for an RPO when developing a sales strategy is not therefore “how can I offer the lowest price?”, but “how can I demonstrate and deliver the greatest unique value?”</p>
<p>This can be difficult for an RPO to define, and often quite uncomfortable.</p>
<p>Typically when I have worked with RPO’s to try and define their unique value there are two default starting positions:</p>
<ol>
<li>“We’re not sure anything we do is better than anyone else…. but we are really nice people and our clients love us…..no they really do!”</li>
<li>“We can deliver everything and anything. It doesn’t matter what type of recruitment, where, when and for who, we can deliver it. We are full service!”</li>
</ol>
<p>These are both really commendable. Full service and being positively viewed by clients is great. But the problem is that all their competitors are saying exactly the same thing. It doesn’t give your prospects anything different to choose from.</p>
<p>The challenge for an RPO is to dig into these two statements and find out:</p>
<ol>
<li>Why their clients love them?</li>
<li>Out of everything you deliver what do you do really well, why and how?</li>
</ol>
<p><strong><em>Value means focus!</em></strong></p>
<p>The answers to these questions can mean facing up to difficult truths. Perhaps not all of our clients love us as much as we think? Perhaps there are some services we aren’t delivering as well as we want to?</p>
<p>So the secret is to identify where both client love is high and service performance is excellent. Find this intersection and you can start to understand how you deliver unique value to your clients. This is where I would recommend an RPO starts searching for its unique value. Look for those specific areas where you are doing something different and better than anyone else.</p>
<p>Typically you will determine expertise and successful delivery of your service in various areas. For instance: particular industries/sectors; specific types of recruitment (volume, niche, graduate?); and particular recruitment process areas (employer branding, onboarding?).</p>
<p>RPO sales is an expensive and often frustrating activity. Many RPO’s struggle to win new business – which is why they resort to a price led strategy.</p>
<p>I know there is reluctance by some RPO leaders to focus their sales effort as it can stop them bidding for deals they would have previously gone for. However by doing so they will without doubt make their sales activity more cost effective, increase success rates considerably, and be able to charge a fair commercially viable price.</p>
<p>Focussing on your unique value is the key to success for RPO's - not price!</p>