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8 Procurement questions for RPO evaluation answered

June 2, 2021 by Content Team

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8 Procurement questions for RPO evaluation answered

Content Team

June 2, 2021

Are you considering an RPO to help your organisation meet its strategic recruitment goals?

Outsourcing the recruitment function is a major strategic consideration that will help you identify and secure your company’s greatest asset – its people. The below 8 questions can be helpful during the procurement evaluation process of an RPO partner, offering a valuable baseline for decision making.

1. Does outsourcing the recruitment function or process align well with your business needs and strategy?

One of the main benefits of RPO solutions is that you can scale the support you require from an RPO up or down depending on your hiring needs. Hudson RPO can work with on-site and off-site recruiters that will form part of and integrate into your existing teams and processes.

2. Will recruitment process outsourcing truly improve your business performance?

From talking with our clients around the world, we have identified the top 4 ways our clients have improved their business performance:

Cost reduction
Working with an RPO partner significantly decreases the average cost-per-hire, often by more than 50 percent. A tailored RPO solution supplements hiring and helps you drive quality, efficiency, and reduced costs and time to hire.

Ability to flex and scale
An RPO solution allows your organization to flex talent acquisition headcount up and down as hiring needs change. Measuring and tracking performance through regular reporting, alongside talent data that is easily translated to insights, you will increase efficiencies, identify improvements, and better forecast future hiring needs.

Quality of hire
Many clients are in a niche sector and need scarce skill sets. Leveraging formerly untapped sourcing channels, to access additional candidates is one of many benefits of outsourcing recruitment. Hudson RPO is experienced in candidate sourcing and has a range of bilingual talent sourcers available to meet client’s needs anytime, anywhere. While helping one of our clients in rural Canada find their niche talent, we reduced their agency fees by 25%, and accomplished an annual cost saving of $60,000.00 USD.

Enhanced employer brand
Utilizing Hudson RPO’s experienced recruiters as an extension of your team provides accessibility to deep candidate networks and reduces time to engage those candidates. Hudson RPO can also include employer branding into your tailored solution to help you further improve your employer brand. As well as creating a better candidate experience, a strong employer brand makes your organisation more attractive to candidates and positions you as the employer of choice in your market or industry.

3. How can you understand and control costs?

It is important to understand the entire pricing structure, and how the package of products, services and management fees may be bundled together. Through insights and regular reporting from Hudson RPO, it will be easy to understand how the investment you make contributes to your recruitment process, what improvements are needed, and what needs to be forecasted for the future.

Cost reduction through shared risk.
When a business downturn hits and recruiting needs suddenly drop, so does a company’s need for recruiting staff. Likewise, when the business is expanding into another product category or region of the world, recruiting needs may suddenly spike.

Outsourcing the recruitment function allows a company to pass along the cost risk of those resources to the business partner. Recruitment outsourcing partners accept the responsibility of efficiently adjusting resource levels when hiring fluctuations happen. As a result, the client does not bear the burden of carrying unnecessary staff.

Similarly, the client faces a lesser chance of being short-staffed when greater resources are required.

Faster time to hire.
Time is money and hiring new professional level employees takes a lot of both. From identifying candidates, to conducting interviews and negotiating offers, acquiring a new employee taxes your internal resources.

Plus, each day a job requisition remains unfilled, your business loses the benefit of that employee’s contribution. Recruiting and budgetary resources are pulled away from other high-value initiatives.

Outsourcing all or part of your internal recruitment function can dramatically reduce your time to hire.

Streamlined recruitment processes.
One of the most common problems we see with the recruitment life cycle is that it’s a disjointed and uncoordinated multitude of practices—good and bad—across organizational functions, departments, divisions and regions.

Often, this causes overlap in media buying, training, and on-boarding procedures. It leads to poorer hiring decisions and higher operational costs.

Piloting an RPO project gives you the opportunity to rethink these processes. The RPO vendor will help examine your recruitment process workflows to determine where overlap, excessive cost, and inefficient practices may exist.

Then, an outsourced model can be custom designed, providing you with service levels and success metrics that exceed the status quo. These practices yield increased efficiency and satisfaction with the recruitment life cycle, resulting in overall cost reduction for your company.

4. Are the financial projections accurate?

It is important for you to take a critical look at any numbers submitted by the RPO provider. Look for assumptions, oversimplifications or just plain misleading figures that may adversely impact your overall cost/fees. It is a good idea to ask for case studies or client testimonials.

5. Will this arrangement still enable you to have the necessary internal human resource skills and expertise needed in any organization?

While outsourcing may be the right direction for your recruitment function, there is still a need for internal expertise to help evaluate chosen strategies and tactics, and coordinate with the RPO provider.

It is essential for RPO providers to understand a company’s historical recruitment needs, the objectives and priorities of stakeholders and the broader HR and business agenda. This data will be the basis for setting correct SLA and KPI benchmarks, which are essential for the management of business expectations and getting the partnership off on a strong foundation.

Your business partner should also be open to transferring all knowledge and turning back over the people and processes to your internal team once a best-practice operation is established and running smoothly.

6. Who will ultimately manage the financial and performance metrics of the contract?

People, processes and technology combine to deliver an RPO solution. It is essential that the company’s internal leadership maintain oversight of any outsourcing initiative. Factoring into the contract terms the time and resources necessary to effectively manage the relationship and its results is smart.

7. What are the cultural ramifications of outsourcing your recruitment function?

Understanding how your managers and broader employee base are going to react to this massive operational change is critical. One essential competency to look for in your RPO business partner is change management expertise. Hudson RPO has knowledge of the potential pitfalls and know ways to ensure organizational support and buy in.

Our client Astrazeneca selected Hudson RPO for our scalabilty, cultural alignment, and experience in pharmaceutical recruitment. The solution for Astrazeneca includes all permanent and fixed term hiring. To set the team up for success, we implemented a change management program to get hiring managers on board in the process.

8. Is there an escape clause in the deal or protection in place for when business conditions change?

As we have seen during the recent recession, business conditions can change in a major way, and fast. You need to make sure you are not locked into a long-term contract or deal with little or no flexibility to alter scope or completely withdraw over time. Here again, making sure that there is a shared risk model for operational costs when hiring demands change is one way to help ensure some of this protection. You could consider an on-demand recruitment solution, getting your company expert support for sudden or challenging hiring requirements for a specified period.

If you have any questions not mentioned above, or would like to speak to a talent expert, please get in touch.

Hudson RPO

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The Hudson RPO Content Team is made up of experts within the Talent Acquisition industry across the Americas, EMEA and APAC regions. They provide educational and critical business insights in the form of research reports, articles, news, videos, podcasts, and more. The team ensures high-quality content that helps all readers make talent decisions with confidence.

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Mental Health Awareness Week @ Hudson RPO

May 14, 2021 by Content Team

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Mental Health Awareness Week @ Hudson RPO

Content Team

May 14, 2021

This year, Mental Health Awareness Week focusses on our connection with nature. During the long months of the pandemic, many of us have turned to nature to clear our minds; coffee catch ups in the park, socially distanced walks, and eventually picnics in the early spring. For good reason, even small moments of contact with nature can reduce feelings of isolation and stress.

At Hudson RPO, mental health and wellbeing are important all year round, but Mental Health Awareness Week was the perfect time to highlight some of our key initiatives, signpost available resources, and organise activities to reconnect with our teams after months of working from home.

Mental Health Awareness Week activities at Hudson RPO were all about connecting, taking time to unwind, and share ideas with each other. Over the week, we shared recipes with each other, created a Spotify playlist of our favourite songs for relaxing, and shared pictures of our ‘chill out spaces’.

On Wellness Wednesday, we kicked off our Step into Summer challenge, where we will walk the distance between our offices in America, the UK and Australia together, and took some well-deserved, scheduled time off. We also started the very first Hudson RPO book club on Thursday and kept active on Friday with an end-of-week workout.

Mental Health Awareness Week 2021 has been a great success thanks to the hard work of our Wellbeing committee, and everyone who participated in the (online) activities. We will continue to share our tips, resources, and support with each other after Mental Health Awareness Week.

Hudson RPO

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How LV= moved to virtual recruiting during the pandemic

April 30, 2021 by Content Team

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How LV= moved to virtual recruiting during the pandemic

Content Team

April 30, 2021

How do you create a great experience for candidates and ensure you hire the right people when working remotely? Hear from our client Kevin Hough, Head of People Performance at LV=, about the changes they made to their hiring process in his interview with Future Talent.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many organisations to accelerate digital transformation programmes. For our client LV=, this also included their recruitment process. “There did come a point when we needed to think about moving things forward and move our recruitment virtual. This was a really interesting challenge, both for our recruitment team and our hierarchy of managers.”

Once hired, candidates moved to a virtual onboarding process which was geared towards making individuals feel ready to start working, as well as connecting with them on a personal level. And while Hough accepts that remote working makes it more difficult to connect with new employees, the organisation has thought hard about how it can build relationships across the organisation.

“One thing we’ve done is to introduce coffee chats. You enter your details into a system, and it randomly matches you with someone across the business – regardless of level or department – who you have a 30-minute chat with. It increases your knowledge and network across the business and keeps our people connected. We encourage new starters to use it, but it’s available to everybody, and we’ve had really high take-up,” says Hough. LV= also partnered with mental health charity Mind to help line managers with training and has implemented shorter catch up-s around priorities, wellbeing, or successes.

“This helps us to be there for each other, to stay in touch and to make sure we’re doing the right things. People are all individuals – we’re all in the same ocean, but everyone’s in a different boat. We all experience things differently, so you need to listen to people and tailor solutions accordingly,” he smiles.

Read more about the changes our client LV= has made in the full interview with Future Talent here.

Hudson RPO

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Post-Pandemic Prediction #3: The Spotlight on Internal Talent

April 9, 2021 by Content Team

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Post-Pandemic Prediction #3: The Spotlight on Internal Talent

Content Team

April 9, 2021

The third prediction in our post-pandemic predictions report was an increased spotlight on internal talent. Good people offer a competitive advantage, so developing the right frameworks to support, coach, and upskill internal talent is vital in unpredictable times with varying hiring requirements.

Internal Mobility Trends

Where previously internal selection processes were often done in parallel with external sourcing efforts, we saw many organisations favour strict ‘internal only’ processes during the COVID-19 pandemic. With sharp declines in external hiring, the focus shifted towards existing, internal talent and redeployment. Resources and attention were redirected to training, coaching, and enhanced managerial oversight of newly promoted or seconded employees.

Many organisations have also made a conscious effort to increase the learning and development offering to staff. As an effort to both upskill and motivate employees during this time, additional resources and external learning tools have frequently been part of engagement strategies.

Benefits of Internal Mobility

While external recruitment is essential to bring new ideas and talent to an organisation, research has shown that the benefits of internal mobility include lower talent acquisition costs, higher retention rates and increased quality of hire.

Increased employee retention.
Lack of career advancement opportunities remains one of the most common reasons for high-potential employees to leave their workplace. Organisations that are able to offer a range of opportunities and potential career paths have higher employee retention. 94% of employees would have stayed longer in their company if it had been able to provide them with more career opportunities.
Reduced costs and time to hire.
As internal candidates need fewer new-hire and onboarding resources and only require training specific to the role’s responsibilities, embracing internal mobility reduces the time to hire and the training costs that organisations usually spend on onboarding new, external hires.

Quality of Hire.
An advantage of internal hires is that they have an already established network and are familiar with the organisation’s processes. Typically, it takes two years for an external hire’s performance reviews to reach the same level as those of an internal hire. Organisations that hire internally are 32% more likely to be satisfied with the quality of their hire.

Leadership Succession Opportunities.
Another benefit of internal mobility is the development of high-potential employees with an eye towards leadership succession. People who know the company, and potentially held different positions, are aware of the challenges and strengths and have insights and perspectives on an organisation’s culture and context that will help them be successful and productive quickly.

Designing your Internal Mobility Capabilities

Even though internal mobility programmes have many upsides, only a third of organisations feel that they have an effective or functioning internal mobility process. Some organisations even tell their recruiters not to contact people within the organisation.

Culture is an essential element of success in internal mobility programmes. Talent should be considered something that can be developed, especially if a company wants to retain its employees long term. A culture in which people feel encouraged to look internally for new opportunities and challenges, and managers are rewarded for training and developing their teams, can contribute to internal mobility.

Recruiters are part of this too and should understand the company’s direction and future needs. They can act as strategic advisors on what career paths typically look like for high-performing internal talent and where learning and development can fill in any gaps that may exist. The right technology can assist, for example, internal job boards or training platforms.

To start an internal mobility programme, an organisation should define the competencies needed for different types of roles. What are the measurable and observable knowledge, skills, and abilities characteristic of high-performance and success in a given job? Knowing these competencies, and the requirements of the role, allows an organisation to recruit and select the best employees, manage and train them effectively, and develop your staff to fill future vacancies.

Once these characteristics have been defined, the next step is to assess employees against these competencies. Usually, those employees have been identified as high-potential through their current job performance. The assessment should aim to answer the question: ‘does this person have the potential to do well at this job if provided the right technical training?’

Employer Branding

Not only will employees need to know about internal opportunities, but they should also be convinced that these opportunities can offer them more than those offered by the company’s competitors. This is where employer branding can be effective for internal audiences: it can help keep the high performers engaged and can turn disengaged employees into engaged employees with the right strategies. Examples of positive employer branding strategies for internal audiences include brand ambassadors, reminding employees of the organisation’s goals and how they are part of that journey, and a positive interview experience for internal opportunities.

Candidate experience is always one of the most critical elements of a recruitment strategy, but even more so in internal mobility programmes. Interviewing an internal candidate comes with the risk of turning a highly engaged employee into a disengaged one very quickly if they believe that there is no opportunity for progression available to them.

Communication with internal candidates should be the same as with external candidates. Ensure regular and clear communication, set expectations early and provide feedback honestly and constructively. A sensitive situation can arise when the internal candidate is not successful in their interview process. It then becomes even more important to offer advice and guidance on the skills they can develop the be successful in similar opportunities in the future.

How can an RPO help?

An RPO partner can help an organisation to facilitate internal mobility. They can have open discussions with hiring managers to identify opportunities that would be suitable for existing employees, develop a competency framework for critical roles, and advise on developing internal talent to be ready to fill future hiring needs.

Depending on your solution, an RPO partner can also identify talent who have specified a specific interest in a role, develop networks with employees and recruitment functions, and oversee the interviewing and onboarding of internal talent while ensuring your process’s integrity and transparency.

Letting your RPO partner drive your internal recruitment ensures you have true recruitment experts handling the expectations of all concerned and helps you shape a company culture where top talent can add maximum value. If you would like to learn more or speak to us about your internal mobility programme, please contact us.

Hudson RPO

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How enforced remote working helped our client Sharp evolve its culture

April 1, 2021 by Content Team

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How enforced remote working helped our client Sharp evolve its culture

Content Team

April 1, 2021

There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has revolutionised how we work. Enforced national lockdowns, restrictions on travel and social distancing mean many organisations have worked remotely, with employees working from their home offices and kitchen tables and relying on email and video conferencing.

Although more than a third of employees in the UK are still working remotely, change is on the horizon. Industries like manufacturing, construction, and transportation are seeing their workforce return to normal. With the effects of vaccination programmes, many businesses are anticipating a return to the office.

But what impact has remote working had on businesses more used to office-based work, and will they make any permanent changes? How has the enforced switch to remote working during the pandemic affected employees and working culture? Our client Phil Herbert, VP HR at Sharp Electronics Europe, talks change and the new world of work with us in his interview with Future Talent.

According to Phil, video conferencing has produced the same results as in-person meetings. As part of a Japanese corporation, Sharp in Europe’s prevailing culture has generally been one of expecting people to work in the office. “Pre-pandemic, we had some flexible working practice but not to a large extent. The expectation was that people should generally be in the office. However, the pandemic has forced us to work remotely, and this has been a huge jump for the organisation, both from a physical ‘how-to do it’ and a cultural viewpoint,” he says.

The impact on productivity has long been held as one of the challenges of remote working. However, for many organisations this has proved to be a fallacy. A recent study found that only 18% thought remote working had made their organisations less productive, with 44% suggesting it had actually made them more productive. The challenge for leaders is maintaining this while shifting to a hybrid remote/office working plan as our economies begin to open up.

Additionally, without being tied to an office, the talent pool has widened exponentially. “Where you can attract talent from has massively widened and what employees expect from employers is different too. Remote working has changed everything.”

Ultimately, the pandemic has acted as an accelerant for many businesses. Digital transformation projects, employee wellbeing programmes and flexible working agendas have all been discussed for years, but the pandemic has forced organisations like Sharp to act. And while the true impact won’t be known for some time, there is – as Phil says – no going back.

For more of Phil’s insights on productivity, culture and hybrid working plans, read the full interview here.

Hudson RPO

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Performance Measurement of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Strategies

March 26, 2021 by Content Team

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Performance Measurement of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Strategies

Content Team

March 26, 2021

This week we shared 10 Ways to incorporate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion into your Talent Acquisition Strategy. Whether you have recently had your ‘Just Start’ moment or are already advanced in your DE&I journey, measuring your progress is an essential part of any strategy.

DE&I measurements can provide a place to start, a baseline to keep track of progress or pinpoint areas in your organisational strategy that need improvement. Measuring diversity, equity, and inclusion can be difficult and should always include input from your employees. This blog discusses how data and metrics can provide important learnings and the common pitfalls to avoid in DE&I measurements.

Data & Insights

Data collection can be done in various ways and, depending on the way you collect your data, will provide different insights. Collecting data should typically be the starting point of a DE&I strategy, as it can provide a baseline for you to track your progress and highlight unexpected areas for improvement in your approach.

Quantitative data can include demographics, such as sexual and religious orientations, ethnicity, or family status. However, it is not always permissible to ask for or use this information, and employees may feel uncomfortable with sharing this kind of information.

An example of another form of quantitative data that could provide useful insights is employees’ participation rate in targeted inclusion initiatives such as training, committees, or employee resource groups.

Quantitative data is helpful for data collection and insights on diversity, but the numbers alone will not tell you the full story. It is important to not only focus on diversity but also on equity and inclusion. This is where qualitative data can help you answer questions like: How are employees feeling about their workplace, do they feel part of their team, and how do their values align to those of the organisation? Engagement surveys are a widely used tool to identify potential management issues, but a network analysis can also highlight how knowledge sharing, collaboration, and networks in your organisation support DE&I goals.

Analysis & Correlational Metrics

Once you have collected your relevant data, analysis and correlational metrics are the next step to understanding how you should address your DE&I goals or where improvement is needed. When seeking leadership buy-in for your objectives, it can be helpful to use correlational metrics to support the value that your program can bring to the organisation.

Correlational metrics can be storytellers when measured against your organisational, hiring or recruitment data. How are different groups making it through your hiring process? Are screening and selection tools applied evenly? Are staff overturns higher in one job family or seniority level? Examples of other correlational metrics include promotion rates, pay rates, and employment status (full time or contract).

Diversity KPIs

Nicki McCulloch, Client Services Director APAC, shares how diversity KPIs can help deliver diversity outcomes. Diversity KPIs need to be considered carefully to make sure they drive the right behaviour in your organisation. To be successful in DE&I, an organisation needs a leadership team that is fully invested in a programme and a joint understanding of what objectives should be met across the business.

Pitfalls to avoid in DE&I Measurements

Measuring diversity, equity, and inclusion can be challenging. However, input from a company’s employees is critical to its success. While there are some best-practice examples, copying what other organisations are doing without tailoring your approach to your organisation and goals will not be effective long-term. Other common pitfalls are:

Authenticity
Focus your research on what is relevant for your organisation and how your data can contribute to insights for your DE&I strategy. A one-time survey is not enough to improve your DE&I.

Accessibility
Make sure the results of your research are accessible to all, as well as the research method itself. For example, make sure the participants of your survey understand what their time and contributions will be used for, how their data will be used and anonymised, and take the necessary steps to ensure everyone who wants to is able to participate.

Transparency
Even if the survey answers are anonymised and confidential, the conclusions of your research and the follow up of the outcomes can still be shared. This will also help assure employees that their time and contributions are valued, taken seriously and that your interest in improving DE&I is genuine.
Equity & Inclusion
As previously mentioned, it is not about diversity alone. It is important to measure equity and inclusion too. DE&I is about more than having a diverse workforce; it is about creating a workplace where everyone feels included and empowered to contribute to your organisation’s goals.

Hudson RPO can help you finetune your DE&I goals and advise on the appropriate metrics and technology for your organisation. Contact us to find out how we can help. If you would like to learn more about DE&I, download 10 Ways to incorporate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion into your Talent Acquisition Strategy or listen to our podcast.

Content Team

8 Procurement questions for RPO evaluation answered

Are you considering an RPO to help your organisation meet its strategic recruitment goals?

1. Does outsourcing the recruitment function or process align well with your business needs and strategy?

2. Will recruitment process outsourcing truly improve your business performance?

3. How can you understand and control costs?

4. Are the financial projections accurate?

5. Will this arrangement still enable you to have the necessary internal human resource skills and expertise needed in any organization?

6. Who will ultimately manage the financial and performance metrics of the contract?

7. What are the cultural ramifications of outsourcing your recruitment function?

8. Is there an escape clause in the deal or protection in place for when business conditions change?

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