The Outsourcing Trend

Being a recruiter you can often feel like a glorified CV sifter, searcher or administrator. With the current market place being so candidate rich it is not uncommon to receive 1000's of applications for any one role, with information being drawn into databases at a rate no recruiter can keep up with. This often results in vast amounts of badly segmented data being left dormant and rapidly becoming out of date as up to 50% of candidates are never contacted. Outsourcing promises to take away all these basic web based processes allowing recruiters to do what they do best - recruit. This is not to be confused with offshoring, which is the relocation of processes such as production or manufacturing. Although outsourcing can also be offshore, it focuses more on third party service providers taking over business processes on a service level agreement, based in a lower cost location. RECRUITMENT PROCESS OUTSOURCING (RPO) Recruitment Process Outsourcing covers services such as: advert response handling, CV re-formatting, CV searching, first level candidate profiling, database cleansing/refreshing and internet research. This allows recruiters more time to focus on building relationships with clients and candidates and securing those all important placements. Outsourcing labour intensive tasks ultimately results in saving recruiters time, but beyond this it also has a number of other advantages including: 

• Greater ability for budgetary control 

• More efficient working for existing staff 

• Access to better technology 

• Access to trained staff, often called administrators 

• Faster turnaround of outsourced tasks

Yet with any business process, there are a number of disadvantages that need to be worked around. After the initial investment of time to choose an outsourced provider, you must then educate them about the intricacies of your business. For some small tasks this can often seem inefficient and when the costs involved are taken into consideration outsourcing is often not the right solution. Other concerns expressed include: 

• Loss of control 

• Confidentiality 

• Quality of output 

• Legal liabilities

When these processes are then routed offshore it comes along with the time additional advantages, allowing research for candidates to been done at evenings and weekends and ready when you come back to the office the next day. Good offshore companies will also not just offer an account manager but a dedicated team that ensure there is no down time on processes. The costs involved in offshoring are also considerably less. However there are the additional concerns about communication problems, language barriers and quality control.

HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF OUTSOURCING

A strong framework is required to get the best results from outsourcing. Vague briefs and unclear objectives can often result in varied results. By ensuring your outsourcing team really understands the intricacies of your business and the standards you require early on they can ensure no major misinterpretations occur. If you require candidate CVs to be formatted in a certain style make sure you present them with clear guidelines. Don't be afraid of giving harsh feedback if there are errors as it can only improve your working relationship.

Close monitoring can also vastly improve results. You will be saving hours by outsourcing these tasks, so taking just a few minutes a day to monitor outputs can ensure that any discrepancies can be picked up early and be rectified so that fewer errors will be made in the future. Make sure you push for a dedicated account manager you can liaise with directly making the monitoring process a lot easier.

Grouping tasks can make outsourcing even more efficient. If you are considering outsourcing CV searching, but why not also ask them to pre-qualify candidates over the phone. Data cleansing goes hand in hand with refreshing. Larger projects are always more efficient when outsourced, and can allow recruiters more time to focus on building relations and second stage interviews.

If you are still not sure if outsourcing is for you, most good providers now offer a free trial. These no obligation trial periods allow you to test the quality of outputs and work out how the logistics will work for you. With recruitment business around the globe all ready outsourcing their labour intensive tasks it appears that outsourcing is the way forward.