Spoilt for choice?
1 December 2008:
Take an ordinary Ford Focus. Put in a fancy new stereo, stick a spoiler on the back and tint the windows, and what do you have? A supercar or a Ford Focus with bits stuck on it? Now try selling that Focus. For a boy-racer interested in bells and whistles, it could be the dream car. For a family needing a reliable runabout, the spoiler could be an immediate turn-off.
It’s a matter of perspective. Firms providing no-frills recruitment outsourcing (RO) are purveyors of a quantifiable service that can be measured in terms of cost per hire and employee turnover. But what about RO companies offering much more – talent management, retention advice, training, market research and so on? Are these add-on services the equivalent of a spoiler and tinted windows, designed to make customers think they’re getting something special, or do they provide genuine added value?
Some would argue that the add-ons have always been part of RO, or recruitment process outsourcing as it is sometimes called. “When I started in RPO 11 years ago we were using rudimentary technology – automated CV passing, applicant experience management software – that you would expect any recruitment management system to have now,” says Lewis Cohen, a management solutions consultant at business services outsourcer Ceridian. With the technology becoming a given, RO providers can concentrate on additional services to help to improve a company’s all-round recruitment and retention.
Sue Brooks, a director of RO provider Ochre House, believes that customers are driving the development of the industry. “A few years ago the customer would talk to us in quantitative terms: cost per hire, efficiency metrics,” she says. “Increasingly they are talking about how to improve business performance. Customers wanted to introduce those things in to our relationships.”
A cynic would suggest this merely proves that customers are realising there’s not much value to be had in pure, technology-based RO alone, and it’s only worth something if there is a consultative angle to it.
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Source: The Times Newspaper
