SPECIAL REPORT – RECRUITMENT
workforce planning
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going into an intelligent process. This is reflected in how recruitment grew and took shape, and is why we are in desperate need of a rethink to improve service delivery across the industry. “Recruitment these days is a sales process and needs to be regarded as its own core function in an organisation,” Marsden-Huggins says. “Just as sales and marketing are now distinct areas of business, recruitment and HR should be separated in the same way. HR is a compliance and risk mitigation function, whereas recruitment is a sales process, and recruitment marketing is probably different again. Each discipline needs the right skills, the right tools, the right measurement and the right support.” It’s also worth noting that, typically, recruitment has peaks and troughs. For example, sometimes 20 new staff are needed and at other times of the year none are required. It begs the question whether a department of five full-time recruiters is viable year-round, and if not, what the alternative might be. Outsourcing is effective from a resourcing point of view as well as in accessing the right skills, yet this too needs to be carefully considered. If people really are important to the success of a business, is it prudent to outsource the function that brings those people into the business? Marsden-Huggins is sceptical: “If you recruit through an agency, you’ll never actually ‘own’ your people. They will! They will own your most important asset. They will call them every six months to ‘see if they are still happy in their role’. Recruitment through traditional agencies will always have higher turnover,” he says.
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Nelson concedes there is no right or wrong way when it comes to recruiting models or recruiting processes, strategies and philosophies. For some organisations it’s in-house, in others it’s outsourced, in others it’s hybrid. “I think this variety reflects changes in both philosophy and economic conditions,” he says. “Having a fluid approach where you continually align and rethink recruitment is a good thing. You should be continuously refining, rethinking, aligning your business and talent strategy and therefore your workforce plan.” As an example, he cites one organisation, which knows it’s not great at recruitment, and does not have it as a core function, yet it’s valued highly. They may want to bring in a specialist firm to support them. “And if that’s called RPO today, that’s what they’ll do,” Nelson says. Other organisations may identify a cluster of roles, which through a workforce plan are recognised as being highly valued, and therefore the recruitment for these roles may be handled in-house. However, for other roles in that same organisation – those that aren’t as strategic – they may want to outsource the function. “This is where confusion comes in: there’s a view that the nonstrategic always gets outsourced, but we’ve got customers where they’ve outsourced everything; we’ve got customers where the strategic is outsourced and some of the operational/admin stuff they believe they can handle and manage themselves. So I say it’s important to have a view, a philosophy, a strategy, with a rationale behind it that is logical and sensible for your business.” Slezak adds that organisations choosing to hold on to the recruitment function themselves no longer necessarily need full-time teams to coordinate and run the entire process. There are plenty of examples of technology helping to speed up the hiring process: from social recruiting tools to job ad copywriting software; from CV-matching technology to online recorded video interviews – all of which help to automate recruitment exponentially. “I’m certainly not saying that technology will replace the human element when it comes to hiring staff, but it can – and has already been seen to – speed up parts of the attraction and selection processes that may have caused bottlenecks in the past,” he says. Meanwhile, for companies choosing to engage an external recruitment partner, it’s time to take a close look at what they are getting in return for what is often an exorbitant investment. “What are they really receiving in return for 15–20% of a candidate’s salary that they can’t find themselves, or that they couldn’t engage an expert independent recruiter charging an hourly rate to help them with? In this instance businesses are paying purely for time and expertise, much like they would for other professional services,” Slezak concludes.