Finding the Right Partner to Help You Find Talent

As the economic downturn recedes, businesses are turning their attention toward economic renewal and the business activities necessary to make the most of the recovery—including recruitment. While many organizations reined in growth during the recession or reduced staffing, they are starting to rebuild their workforces once again.

Growing Demand for On Demand

Over the years, organizations looked to traditional recruitment strategies that utilized internal resources, external recruitment agencies, or a combination of the two. But as the business landscape shifts, and as the recession and recovery brings new challenges, these approaches fail to provide companies with the flexibility, speed, cost-effectiveness, and top-notch talent they need.

Leading organizations are also recognizing that recruitment has evolved. Just as other services and products—from software to movies—are being delivered on-demand and in a highly configurable form, so are recruitment services. As a result, more and more companies are finding talent by first finding an external recruitment partner who can provide the level of service they need, when they need it.

A study of more than 600 Canadian companies (2009-2012 Canadian HR Market Study & Forecast, Ipsos Reid/Ceridian Canada) showed that almost 60% of enterprise organizations source at least part of the recruiting process with an external partner. For large organizations, the figure is just over 50%. And for mid-sized companies, it is just under 40%.

According to Susan Grant, Executive Director, Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Ceridian Canada, "Leading organizations are recognizing that scalable, on-demand solutions from a trusted recruitment partner can provide them with the flexibility, transparency and cost-effectiveness they need—while delivering top candidates."

Internal Flexibility from an External Partner

Partnering with recruitment service providers increase an organization's internal flexibility by meeting their recruitment needs exactly, based on their size, budget and specific requirements. With an external service provider strategy, a company can pick and choose the services and level of support that best suits them. A unique, customized, scalable solution can be designed that includes all or a combination of a provider's services.

Perhaps more importantly, the external partner solution can respond to changing circumstances—not only those brought on by economic ups and downs, but also typical variations brought on by individual projects, expansion, contraction or turn-over. Internal solutions especially have a hard time coping with such fluctuations, often resulting in internal recruiters who are either overworked or under-utilized.

During the recession, many organizations experienced hiring freezes and lay-offs which resulted in fewer hires and have downsized their in-house recruitment resources. As the market has started to rebound and companies are growing again and businesses find themselves without the resources to support the increase in newly created openings. Continued uncertainty related to the market and being able to accurately predict hiring volumes for 2010 creates hesitancy in terms of bringing on more full-time recruiting headcount. HR leaders are looking for alternatives that can manage their recruitment administration without ongoing fixed costs.

Also, organizations are more flexible when they leverage a recruitment partner's full-time, fully-engaged recruitment professionals with specialized expertise. A company or recruiting agency might not normally have expertise in a specific region of the globe or in a niche technology. A company can find that expertise through a managed recruitment solution partner.

For example, a global engineering consulting firm based in Guelph, Ontario, specializing in architectural design testing for environmental factors. When they expanded globally, one of their challenges was finding qualified candidates with niche skills in wind tunnel testing, physical scale modelling, computer modelling, and water flume testing. And these individuals were needed in India and the UK. It was through a partnership with a global recruitment partner that they were able to fulfil all their recruitment needs.

This strategy gives organizations the flexibility to forego a full-sized recruitment capability internally. Instead, their internal, strategic HR team can work with an external partner who acts as an true extension of their corporate recruitment team. As recruitment needs vary, it is the partner that is responsible for scaling their service. Even cost is flexible as, typically, adjustments can be made to an annual, fixed-price contract based on hiring variances from established baseline.

Focus on Strategy and Core Business

According to Ceridian's Susan Grant, "Successful organizations have come to understand the strategic importance of their HR departments—HR is a strategic catalyst for the rest of the company. By outsourcing part or all of their recruitment administration, it possible for a company's internal HR resources to focus on strategy and high level activities that are value added to the core business." And while the importance of organizational focus is always high, it is even higher during an economic downturn and recovery. That's why more and more companies are turning to an external partner for their recruiting needs.

When recruitment administration is effectively outsourced, transferring management and execution of the recruiting function becomes the responsibility of the service provider who is tasked with pre-employment background and reference checks, job advertising, applicant tracking résumé screening, interviews, interview scheduling working on behalf of the organization. With a true partner, there is transparency to all the hiring activities, company branded job postings and access to all the resumes received as a result of the search. The partner seeks to fully understand the work environment and culture in order to provide consistent service delivery. On demand recruiting allows organizations access to scalable resources that seamlessly carry out recruiting under their company name. Candidates are typically unaware that the recruiting has been outsourced.

With this approach, an organization's internal HR department can target time and resources to metrics, business analysis, HRIS, compensation, and client-facing HR. It allows internal HR to address strategic issues such as the development of specific business unit staffing strategies, the identification of key role requirements, the development of success profiles, and improving candidate assessments.

Controlling costs

Of course, tough economic conditions make it critical to control costs and maximize cost-effectiveness. Recruitment technology and job advertising costs are difficult for many companies to manage. Organizations find they can achieve this goal by adopting an outsourced recruitment strategy with an external partner who can provide the tools and resources as part of the offering in a cost-effective manner.

Creating a best-in-class HR recruitment capability internally requires an enormous commitment of resources, and many companies find it more effective to work with an external recruitment provider that is already a best-in-class recruiter. This approach allows a business to allocate internal resources to its core business needs, rather than to developing and maintaining internal HR teams and systems.

In addition to leveraging a service provider's people, processes and technology, the external partner strategy helps companies control costs in other ways. To begin with, an on-demand, scalable approach means paying only for the services you need, when you need them. The cost-per-hire is also lower than with external recruitment agencies. Reduced time-to-fill and a shorter recruitment cycle translate into savings. Cost is also reduced by eliminating the time that internal HR employees spend sifting through large numbers of prospects; instead, internal HR resources focus on the top qualified candidates.

What's more, responsiveness and shorter time-to-hire can go beyond simply controlling costs; it is also arguably a revenue-generation strategy. For example, inefficient recruitment can block revenue generation by slowing a company's growth, or by impeding the hiring of people into revenue-generating positions like sales. A slow hiring process can mean the difference between success and failure during an economic downturn and recovery.

The Bottom Line: Top Talent

Of course, the objective of any recruitment solution is talent—the high-performing, skilled talent needed to make the most of an economic recovery. Flexibility, focus and cost-effectiveness mean nothing if a recruitment solution delivers the wrong people to your organization. With the right partner and an on-demand approach, organizations are finding the talent—along with all the other benefits of an external recruitment solution.


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