Recruitment and workforce agility
2011 was a good year for Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) although interestingly buyers’ primary drivers have changed over the past year as a result of the economic climate. For example, in the early part of 2011, business was booming with sales occurring across a broad range of industries and investments in R&D and product development boosting hires across the market. For RPO, the market was busy although most businesses were looking for selective RPOs which can also be interpreted as project recruitment to support the aforementioned expansions. There were a few large RPO projects with global businesses however, the pipeline for new enterprise-wide RPOs chiefly focused on leveraging RPOs where it made sense to support business growth.
By later that summer, the climate changed dramatically and so did the buying behavior for RPO. As a result, many businesses started to move faster in an attempt to decrease headcount on the books and to identify ways of streamlining their business and have an effective way to handle recruitment. RPO projects continued to flourish later in the year with buyers motivated by the need to keep their businesses agile and streamlined due to a number of reasons including cost reduction, scale, expansion into unknown geographies, recruitment centralization for improve process consistency and employee market message, and a desire to be more educated in RPO altogether.
As 2012 gets underway, RPO buying has moved away from traditional motives of cost and scale for a broad spectrum of reasons, namely to help businesses stay responsive and to provide them with a competitive edge in the market. This has meant that RPO and RPO providers are having to step up to the occasion to be innovative providers of solutions to clients. They must therefore demonstrate an ability to be nimble in response to company needs. In many cases, RPO providers are being given samples of work to prove how they can deliver tangible benefits as businesses that have suffered in the current economic climate enter the RPO constituency with caution wanting to be wowed by the provider’s ability to support the business’ often unknown and uncertain commercial strategies.
Jeanne MacDonald
VP & General Manager, RPO & Project Recruitment
jeanne.macdonald@futurestep.com