In today’s world where there is a global man-hunt for solid talents that are becoming scarce, Talent Acquisition has become a major challenge for most Talent Acquisition leaders. This situation is not dissimilar be it a talent hunt by a global multi-national corporation or a regional/local company. Multi-national corporations used to reap gains from labour arbitrage through employing labour from emerging and developing countries. Now labour costs in once haven for low-cost labour like China are rising. Another issue is the rapid ageing workforce in Western multinationals’ home markets and also Asia including Japan and Singapore. The net result of this is an intensifying global war for talent.
Talent Acquisition challenges include the below (definitely not an exhaustive list):
- Workforce planning and forecasting hiring that need to be as accurate as possible.
- Maintaining brand reputation during recruitment process especially social recruiting.
- Keeping up with new tools and technologies like Applicant Tracking Systems. At times, these tools can work to the disfavour of Recruiters as applicants face technical issues when submitting resumes.
- When talent spotting, the ability to assess potential increasingly becomes an art rather than science.
- Competencies required for the same role might change in correlation with the changes in the organizational dynamics.
- Applicants might withdraw during the recruitment process.
- Decrease in employee retention rate. It doesn’t help that a significant portion of the recruitment activities is to replace leavers rather than growth driven. High staff turnover incur both direct and indirect costs to organizations. A PwC Saratoga analysis shows that APAC resignations are approximately twice as high as in the West (US or Europe).
With tough KPIs and abovementioned challenges, Talent Acquisition itself at times is a role hard to fill. Hence, Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) becomes an option worth implementing. This is a form of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) where an organization can transfer all or part of its recruitment process to an external service provider.
An effective RPO partner handles a myriad of tasks including:
- Selling the Employer Value Proposition to entice the right talents and maximize the brand value
- High-volume recruitment
- Job posting
- Vacancy monitoring
- Resume sourcing, screening and processing
- Mapping competitors’ organizational structures and extracting talents from them
- Candidate pool networking
- Pre-assessment of spotted talents
- Interview management
- Offer management
- Employee referrals
- Comprehensive new employee on-boarding
- Talent training and development
The RPO Team becomes fully accountable for quality of hire, cost per hire, cycle time to hire, fill rate, client satisfaction, candidate satisfaction and retention of placed candidates.
The RPO proposition has become real for its meaningful benefits:
- Reduced talent acquisition related stress
- Improved productivity
- Scalable geographically if the client organization needs to hire in multiple countries and lack the country-specific know-how
Given the continuing challenges when acquiring talent, Recruitment Process Outsourcing is definitely going to be an integral part of many organizations.
Note:
This article is written by Kannan Chettiar, Managing Director of Avvanz. Avvanz has 3 business pillars – Avvanz Hire (Recruitment Process Outsourcing and Comprehensive New Employee On-boarding), Avvanz Screen (including Psychometric Assessment and Background Screening) and Avvanz Develop.
