Virtual Integrated Sourcing – Optimize, Improve and Succeed!!

2009-03-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

Your recruiter’s are the people who bring brains, talents and new ideas to your company. What do you consider them? A unavoidable overhead that you can cut out at any point of time OR a vital component of your company who help company to optimize, develop and further maintain the mechanics or the reason why your company does well OR not so well.

So, we start it by considering OR re-iterating the fact the in-house recruiters are the one who plays an important role to develop your company going further. After-all, humans are the ones who brings process and technology into the picture – aren’t they?

Now, you will say that – hey, it’s recession time. Recruitment is the last thing on my list, why I should worry too much about re-engineering my recruitment function? Well, it’s logical question – but a true entrepreneur and business unit leader will not just think about reducing the cost straight forward because it’s a panic time but to see how the function can be optimize by keeping the same quality but moving the blocks a bit which helps your costs to come down. Again, you would know that recruitment function still has to support the maintenance and replacements for human resources. In this tragic time, last thing you need is bad hiring screwing up the invaluable existing clients and new clients. You have to continue hiring – even at very small proportion. And though your small time goals are cost-cutting, you know that these times will pass by and the strong function will give you a winning formula once the road to recovery commences.

So, what’s the outcome? How do we still maintain the in-house resourcing function strong enough – without not letting it hit your bottom-line? The part of this Da-Vinci code is – Global Distributed Resourcing Function.

Global Distributed Resourcing Function

Yes, it’s Offshoring! But not to third party where you loose the control, visibility and responsibility of the function – you use your own captive centers to make it work. Plus, we are not talking about firing people out of the work to offshore it to few Indians – we are talking about distributing (optimizing) the process in such a way wherein everyone in this whole process will work to their core strengths, making the process very feasible, controlled and crystal clear to provide you transparent output for each component. It’s partnership between these functions which help this process to WORK!!!

Why?

How many of your recruiters are bestin resourcing? How many are experts at Boolean searching, search engine cheat codes, using networks to it’s best utility, using out of the box resourcing methods like name generation OR even using job boards to the very best maximum effect?

OK – let’s ask this. Do you think that this is what your recruiter should do the whole hours? Checking online portals? Surfing internet to find people? Going through thousands of job applies? OR how about doing at what they are best at… Actual Recruiting!!! Partnering with internal HR / Hiring Managers to understand the requirement, using their own network and building it, creating and developing the relationships with candidates, creating brand awareness in market etc.

How?

The Central Shared Service platform is an excellent way to implement this concept. You bring all the organizational recruitment departments resourcing function at a central stage. That means, all the requirements from your various departments, locations, sites and countries comes at Virtual Global Resourcing Team.
The Virtual Global Resourcing Team is a subject matter expert in virtual resourcing. It will have a perfect mixture of industry domain experts, internet researchers, telephone researchers and online media creative experts.
This team will essentially handle all the candidate generation, resourcing and validation function which is the first layer of your end to end resourcing function.
The VRG team works in partnership with your in-house recruiters to work on their requirements – sourcing the best candidates from internet, job boards and telephone research. They will essentially create a long-list of verified and accurate candidates who are ready to get ahead in the process. They can even take one step ahead and do first level interviewing to filter.
The relationship and processes between in-house teams and VRG teams are strictly bounded by SLAs in terms of number roles, candidates, response time, interviews & placement ratios.
Apart from the live roles, this team will constantly hunt for the talent mapping / pipeline exercise. They will have a very close eye on market regarding who’s getting available from your competitors. You get the database of best people available before your competitor taps them.
The VRG team will also be working on all the administrative aspects like database cleansing, uploading etc.

The basic purpose of creating this team is take away unnecessary tasks from your recruiters, freeing them for what they do best and commercially, optimizing the team sizes and bringing down your fix recruitment costs.

Why do I do this if I’m using third party service providers?

That’s where this concept provides you more technical and commercial ownership. The recruitment and executive search companies taps the same pool of candidates available in the market – that’s the same pool can be put up in your own pocket.

The agencies charge way too high price for providing the candidates. Imagine, you getting the same candidates without paying 20% odd high fees.
Third party companies are not much worried about talent at your site. You may have experienced having irrelevant candidates wasting your time – provided by third parties. (Surely with exceptions).
The third party providers mostly earn their money through long build candidate database and relationship they build with them – including networking. With your own dedicated resourcing team, you can leverage the same advantage but for your own company, exclusively!
You don’t expect these companies to help you in your employer branding. With well supported creative executive in your team – you can improve your employment branding to attract best in the market.
And much more…

Other Advantages

Get more clarity on the numbers being delivered by your team and improve the hit ratio. (Time to hire, cost to hire, interview / placement ratio, resource effectiveness). This also helps in improving the direct hire ratio as oppose to indirect. Remember that increasing direct hires means saving your precious costs!
Keeps a tab on market very closely with dedicated people creating a “Watch-Dog” through various internet resources.
Utilizing your internal candidate database in best possible ways as this team will maintain the database to best usage of the recruiters.
Time-difference between the teams means you can have the recruitment activity going on for 24/7.
Also helps in working as a market research function for making strategic decisions about hiring.

Why do I add more heads in the times of Cost-Cuttings?

You’re right in thinking that way but change the angel a bit.

In this dynamic economy – you can’t get away with 0% employee turn-over even if you freeze the recruitment. There will be few resignations, retirements and new projects (even in small size). These slight upward spikes will result in going to agencies who will charge way high prices. With the talent much readily available, you will miss out on relatively easier searches which agencies will complete.

Have you also looked at direct-hires VS indirect-hire ratio? In most cases, that indicates how mature and complete your recruitment process is. Better direct-hire ratio means fewer costs; so indirectly you are reducing the cost without reducing your valuable heads.

In terms of process efficiency – this way you will bring all your recruitment activities under one roof which will give you more clear indications on how your internal function is doing and what is the road to improvement. You will posses more control to whom you are bringing internally.

Your close eye to the market will help you to build internal strategies about technologies, products, services and process structures. You have better control – end to end.

Many Thanks

Sarang, Brahme

+91 9923241218