Yoh magazine may14

GOOD EGG OR GOLDEN EGG: THE SECRETS TO RECRUITING ONE-OF-A-KIND TALENT HOW RPO SAVED POST-RECESSION RECRUITING RECRUITMENT PROCESS PRODUCTIVITY OUTSOURCING

RETHINKING THE ROLE OF HR:

THE NEW IMPERATIVE FOR RPO

© 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

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WHAT’S INSIDE 03 Rethinking the Role of HR: The

New Imperative for Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)

09 Good Egg or Golden Egg:

The Secrets to Recruiting One-of-a-Kind Talent

13 How RPO Saved Post-Recession Recruiting

17 RPO: Recruitment Process Productivity Outsourcing

RETHINKING THE ROLE OF HR: THE NEW IMPERATIVE FOR RECRUITMENT PROCESS OUTSOURCING (RPO)

The productivity of the U.S. worker continues to grow -- at an annualized rate of 3.2 percent according to the latest figures. We are all doing more work with fewer resources.

That is a good thing, but it means companies, departments, and employees have to be continually reinventing themselves, thinking about new ways to get the work done.

The HR department is no exception. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), median HR staff sizes have held steady from 2009 through 2012. HR is doing more with the same (or with less) -- automating repetitive tasks, concentrating on activities that have a strategic impact on the organization, and looking for ways to reduce costs.

For example, the changing nature of recruitment -- in a contradictory “jobless recovery” where companies © 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

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nonetheless find it difficult to fill essential positions-is leading companies to take a hard, new look at recruitment process outsourcing (RPO). In many ways, RPO is more vital today than ever before, as it has morphed in response to the changing nature of work and the workforce.

The recession was a wake-up call for many companies.

“Companies learned the hard way that a fixed in-house recruiting model is really expensive,” said Andy Roane, Vice President of RPO at Yoh. “If you have 30 recruiters in your organization, and you have a fluctuation in the number of requisitions you have open, you are either going to strain your organization, because you don’t have enough recruiters, or you are going to be inefficient, because you have too many.”

“On the other end of the recession,” continued Roane, “companies found it difficult to rehire recruiters and scale up when they needed to hire more people.”

Companies are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the way they approach efficiency. Every aspect of a company’s business process is now open to question:

© 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

Is it part of our core competency? Is it cost-effective for us to do this ourselves? Is it better to let someone else do this and focus our resources on something more strategic?

RPO is getting a new look because it gives companies the ability to variabilize their cost structure, paying only for what they need to meet their current workload. It also offers compelling economics compared to more traditional approaches to outside recruiting, such as working with a recruiting agency. RPO can be as little as 60 percent of the cost of working with an agency, and an RPO partner is focused on achieving the client’s business goals, not just making a fee off a quick hire.

Of course, most RPO engagements are about improving time, cost, and quality, but RPO also provides significant strategic benefits, where using RPO has enabled a company to do something it wasn’t able to do before:

• Finding the golden egg. There are times when there are only five or six people worldwide who could fill a very specialized role – and to

© 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

find that talent, traditional recruitment tactics have to be turned on their head. Through RPO, companies are able to leverage the network, time, and resources of an outside recruiter, one with expertise in finding experts. See this month’s article on “Good egg or golden egg: The secrets to recruiting one-of-a-kind talent.”

• Focus away from recruitment to more strategic HR issues. Five years ago, one of our clients had HR business partners in every one of its major locations and remote plants, and they were all responsible for recruiting. In fact, recruiting took up so much of their time that the HR business partners couldn’t do anything else but recruit.

Turning the recruiting functions over to an RPO provider freed up the overworked HR business partners and allowed them to focus on strategic issues like employee engagement and retention.

See the article “How RPO saved post-recession recruiting” for more on this.

• Focus on program process, methodology, and accountability. Organizations are starting to understand that recruiting is a pipeline development process, one that can and should be under continuous improvement. With process comes method, and with method comes p. 5

accountability. RPO enables companies to leverage best practices across industries, a viewpoint that can only be taken by fresh eyes from outside the firm. The service level agreement (SLA) with the RPO provider enables both parties to pay attention to improving the process of talent sourcing. Read the article “RPO: Recruitment Process Productivity Outsourcing” for details.

This last point -- process, methodology, and accountability -- offers the greatest strategic opportunity in the use of RPO. As Roane explained, “For many companies, the number one issue is simply a lack of visibility into what actually happens in the recruitment process. This comes down to data. If you don’t have the data, you can’t measure, you can’t manage, and you can’t make it more efficient.” Roane shared the client story profiled in the article “RPO: Recruitment Process Productivity Outsourcing,” where understanding the data behind the recruitment process enabled a company to cut 12 days from its handling of every candidate. “If you are able to reduce timeto-fill, that can make a real contribution to the bottom line.”

There are many times when process can serve as a competitive differentiator, something that brands the company in the minds of potential candidates as a great place to work.

Everybody complains about companies that are “resume black holes,” where candidates send in resumes and never © 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

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hear back. One thing top RPO providers institute early on in a lot of RPO engagements is a candidate disposition system, so that candidates can see where they are in the process and ensure proper follow-up.

This keeps candidates warm too when a decision hasn’t been made. In today’s business climate, when many of the best candidates are passive candidates who are not actively looking for work, having a good experience throughout the hiring process can help make a candidate choose to make a job switch.

RPO is not a new approach to managing talent acquisition, but the changing economy is leading many companies to take a renewed look at RPO. RPO, as well, has changed to keep pace with today’s business world.

“Great companies look at the RPO relationship as a true partnership in every sense of the word,” concluded Citti. “When they, as the talent acquisition leader, are given a task or goal, or are asked to rise to a challenge, they should have the confidence to look straight to their RPO partner to help make it happen.”

“RPO has become much more fluid, much more based on the idea that a client’s needs can change in a moment’s notice. In the past, RPO was strictly for direct hire and almost always exclusive.”

“RPO has become much more fluid, much more based on the idea that a client’s needs can change in a moment’s notice,” said Alison Citti, Vice President of RPO Client Services at Yoh. “In the past, RPO was strictly for direct hire and almost always exclusive.” Citti explains that companies now often use an RPO process for contingent and temporary labor requisitions. It’s also increasingly common for companies to outsource the recruiting of people for different functions or levels to separate RPO companies. © 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

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UNCOVER TALENT Š 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

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GOOD EGG OR GOLDEN EGG:

THE SECRETS TO RECRUITING ONE-OF-A-KIND TALENT Finding highly skilled, rarified talent is a major challenge in American industry. In domains as diverse as life sciences, technology, and energy, advances are often achieved by Ph.D.-level or similar quality talent. Finding this talent is a near impossibility considering that individuals with these qualifications are most likely gainfully and happily employed in challenging careers.

These ultra-high-performing professionals also don’t respond to typical recruitment tactics. They value the scope of the challenge and the impact of their contribution above all else. With this in mind, RPO providers such as Yoh maintain specialized recruitment processes that can specifically target the world-class talent that drives the innovation engines of the world’s greatest corporations.

© 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

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Here are four insights into these candidates that Yoh’s recruiters have gained from successfully tracking down unique hires for a number of leading organizations:

Insight #1:

They’re motivated by internal and external peer recognition. These candidates work at the forefront of their fields and yearn for the accolades that accompany new discoveries, inventions, and insights.

Takeaway: Give them the limelight. Give them a pathway to publishing and make sure they speak to international peer sets.

Insight #2:

They’re stimulated by the big challenge. These professionals bring broad vision to their field, mining possibilities that few others recognize.

Takeaway: Be bold. Set your sights on the biggest challenge that your industry faces and express your enterprise’s curiosity and ambition to all-star talent.

Insight #3:

They want to find answers to highly complex problems beyond current capabilities. In computing, these are the data engineers are making sense of terabytes of disparate information. In life sciences, these are the minds unraveling the riddles of cancer, aging, and improving the human condition. In technology, these are the © 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

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scientific minds bringing forth quantum computing solutions that seem to defy the very laws of physics.

Takeaway: They’re always seeking out places where they can help accomplish something previously thought impossible, so give them a wide berth and big playing field.

Insight #4:

They question, they disrupt, and they confront. These minds always ask why. They never settle for the status quo. They’re constantly looking to optimize.

Takeaway: Don’t sell the status quo. Be open to their ideas. Project your corporate culture as one accepting to outsiders and different thinkers. Position your company as minds equal to the challenge of constant innovation.

These candidates are founts of innovation prized by organizations world-wide, making them among the hardest to recruit. But the very reasons they’re so highly sought after reveal some of the keys to bringing them on board. Relying on our in-depth understanding of the psychology of these unique candidates has guided our success in securing even the rarest talent. p. 11

SINK OR SWIM Š 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

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HOW RPO SAVED POST-RECESSION RECRUITING

Five years ago, a global technology provider made a difficult decision. They called in 100 of their recruiters, housed in various regions throughout the country, and laid them all off.

One hundred professionals who had made their careers finding top talent for the organization, were, in an instant, rendered superfluous. Certainly it came with pain for those employees. But just as important, this difficult scenario showcases the changing nature of recruitment, and how more and more companies are choosing to outsource the tactical skillsets of talent recruitment in order to focus on the core competencies of human resources.

To this day, the company in question, who will remain anonymous, maintains a robust HR department. In fact, the department has more staff now than before it laid off its recruiters. Those professionals, however, are focused on the increasing complexities of HR management, as payroll, compliance, legal, and talent acquisition become increasingly sophisticated and demand more time, resources, and money. Š 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

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Companies today have to comply with an array of workplace rules and regulations, many of which come with significant penalty when ignored or breached. At the same time, increased globalization complicates payroll, taxation, culture, and legal issues.

One solution is recruitment process outsourcing (RPO).

This company, for instance, found that by turning its recruitment over to a full-time, outside specialist, they were able to leverage an array of new ideas and strategies that were simply unavailable to in-house recruiters.

By outsourcing, HR departments gain the following recruitment benefits from their RPO partners: •

Š 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

The ability to leverage social media. For a plethora of reasons, countless corporations struggle to fully leverage the power of social media, especially in their recruitment processes.

In many organizations, social media might be controlled by marketing teams or hindered by

legal compliance issues. RPO providers avoid those pitfalls and can use their existing social media channels to source an array of positions.

•

Outreach to talent communities. Specialized RPO providers often have reach and access into targeted talent communities that a single corporation could never achieve. Their unique domain knowledge and presence allows them to fill jobs more quickly and efficiently by tapping these rich talent pools.

•

A logistically rich pipeline approach. Many corporations recruit on an as-needed basis. When a position opens, they reach out to the market.

This one-and-done approach fails to create a recruitment pipeline of candidates who are in various stages of the employment process. RPOs are uniquely designed to build a logistics pipeline of candidates that can be quickly onboarded as positions become available.

the moment of need,” says Matt Rivera, Director of Customer Solutions at Yoh. The most significant benefit of RPO is its ability to free HR talent to focus on core business objectives instead of the tactical nature of recruitment. One company’s decision to exit the recruitment game resulted in better overall corporate performance by refocusing investments and HR on increasingly sophisticated challenges.

“The ability to find the right person for the right job at the right time is not a random undertaking, but rather part of a recruitment framework that constantly attracts a candidate and moves them efficiently through the process in order to ensure talent at © 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

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DRIVE TO HIRE Š 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

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RPO: RECRUITMENT PROCESS PRODUCTIVITY OUTSOURCING

Five years ago, a global technology provider made a difficult decision. They called in 100 of their recruiters, housed in various regions throughout the country, and laid them all off.

As corporations try to do more with less, process isn’t just some fuzzy intangible; it’s a real bottom-line value. The ability for outside experts to apply best practice standards often reduces recruiting costs and attracts the highest quality talent.

Take, for instance, one Fortune 500 company that had developed a two-step process for interviewing high-level talent. The process relied on a series of two meetings conducted on separate days. The rationale seemed to make sense: The company believed it needed two interviews performed by two separate executives in order to fully vet the quality of a candidate. © 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

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When the company then turned to an outside RPO firm, Yoh performed a deep analysis designed to streamline the process while delivering the quality of candidates that could drive the business forward. An investigation showed that, while seemingly rational, the company’s long-standing interview policy increased costs, lengthened the time to hire by an average of 12 days, and ultimately increased the chances that a quality candidate would find an alternative job during the delay caused by the company’s own process.

Yoh’s study also showed that the dual-interview approach did not increase the accuracy of the review, with less than 15 percent of candidates filtered out during the process. In fact, a single, well-constructed interview proved to be more effective in determining the candidates’ fit and qualifications. Overall, the company’s previous process added anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million in recruitment expense when factoring in the interviewers’ compensation rates, lost productivity as the position remained vacant, and scheduling costs.

By putting the “p” (productivity) into RPO, the company reduced costs and increased its ability to © 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

meet recruiting objectives -- a key business driver on which the recruitment team’s onus is hinged.

“One of the major benefits of RPO is gaining access to best-practice data that can identify where costs are leaking and where time is slipping in the drive to hire,” says Andy Roane, Vice President of RPO at Yoh. “In this case, we were able to empirically demonstrate how process improvement could deliver a real bottomline value, reduce recruitment costs, and avoid the cascading inefficiencies that result when hiring slips.

For instance, this company knew that failing to fill this position would cause it to miss key product development deadlines that would reduce overall revenue. By applying a data-driven analysis, we were able to overcome flawed assumptions and achieve recruiting objectives at a total cost savings for the enterprise.”

© 2014 Yoh Services LLC | A Day & Zimmermann Company

“By applying a data-driven analysis, we were able to overcome flawed assumptions and achieve recruiting objectives at a total cost savings for the enterprise.”

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YOU NEED IT. WE HAVE IT.

Yoh is here. Yoh is there. Yoh is virtually everywhere. All in and busy going all out, doing everything it takes to take you where you want to go – forward. How? By foregoing the talent pool in favor of our own sea of talent, helping you find just the right person for the job or just the career you’ve been searching for.