Who is Running the Nut House While We Vacation at the Asylum, Darling?
I have long maintained RPO should stand for recruitment problem outsourcing and not recruitment process outsourcing, a dopey term if ever I heard one.
I have been involved with RPO companies large and small in various capacities over the years. I can say with the confidence of an insider that in the main, they or no less dysfunctional, inept, devoid of imagination and generally wattless than the clients who they purport to transcend.
No two employers are alike. They are all different by virtue of their size, orientation, positioning, culture, experience, leadership, workforce and yada-yada-yada.
So, how can a process that systematizes something as nuanced, complex and involved as recruiting passive, semi-passive, semi-active, active, and/or hyper-active candidates — who, I might add, could match any number of psychographic constructs, fit any number of demographic profiles and/or be in any number of geographic areas — be farmed out to an industry that is one slice short of a loaf of bread?
Surely the only RPOs worth looking at are the ones that have a process for identifying the underlying problem that is being outsourced and who recognize the problem could be an issue internally as well as within the clients’ operation.
Provided an RPO can be that artful, call a spade a spade on economies of scale and demonstrate how they’ve tackled their own “problems” — God knows there are some marginal recruiters, systems and practices out there — then who are we kidding?
I don’t have any firsthand experience of an RPO that is that open to that degree of self-examination and equally transparent about what they find. Do you? Nah, what are we, nuts?
3 Comments, Comment or Ping
Amit Desai
I have written an article that deals with what really is recruitment process outsourcing and why RPO is the latest buzzword amongst people involved in attracting, hiring, and retaining manpower. In last few years I have been actively involved in the RPO space and would like to share my views via this article. recruitment process outsourcing
To me outsourcing of HR services is a very old concept, in early days and even today most companies outsource their sourcing of manpower to recruitment agencies and staffing & manpower consultants. Gradually it moved from sourcing to non-core processes like payroll processing, fit gap analysis, reference checks and to a certain extent on-boarding. Smart marketers at that time labelled it as human resource outsourcing. HRO generically deals with outsourcing full or part (non-core) processes to a specialist vendor. RPO in its basic essence is an integral part of HRO where the recruitment process (in part or full) of the organization is outsourced.
In current market scenario Recruitment process outsourcing is beginning to catch on as large companies strive to improve their bottom lines and maintain quality at the same time.
You can read the complete article here : http://www.gigathoughts.com/outsourcing/rpo-recruitment-process-outsourcing.html
Mar 28th, 2009
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