Yesterday afternoon I had the privilege of being the guest on the Blog Talk Radio show DriveThruHR with hosts Bryan Wempen and William Tincup. Given the positive comments on Twitter I guess the show went pretty well although the challenge with a live radio interview is that you can always go back and think about how you might have answered questions differently.
Bryan and William’s standard question to their guests is “What keeps you up at night”. For me that is the national staffing firms watering down the term “RPO” by placing Contract Recruiters with clients and calling it an “RPO”. Placing a Contract Recruiter with a client (something we also do but do not call it RPO) is just that. Recruitment Process Outsourcing is what the name implies: An outsourced business function. We have several successful Recruitment and Human Resources outsourcing engagements under our belts yet I almost never use the terms RPO or HRO anymore. The national staffing firms have bastardized those terms to the point where I don’t want to be associated with the terms. Also, chances are good that if a potential client of ours has had some interaction with a national staffing firms “RPO Division” that interaction has been negative.
You may think that I am splitting hairs but I am proud of the work that we’ve done and the delivery model we’ve developed. The last thing I want anyone to do is associate what we do to the “RPO Divisions” of most national staffing firms. It’s apples and oranges.
The other thing that keeps me up at night is how the national staffing firms have considerably pushed down rates for Contract Recruiters. Bill rates for Contract Recruiters today approach half of what we were seeing in the mid to late 90’s. I see Contract Recruiter job postings by national staffing firms with pay rates of $20 to $25 per hour. That is considerably less than half of what we pay Contract Recruiters throughout the United States. I have been in this industry for almost 19 years and can say with confidence that you will not find a competent, experienced and professional Contract Recruiter at a $20 or $25 per hour pay rate. The national staffing firms strive to put “butts in seats” rather than provide a professional and more importantly effective service. More often than not the Contract Recruiters they are providing come from their traditional clerical and industrial staffing divisions, have no internal corporate recruiting experience and no experience recruiting for professional or technical level positions.
I shared a story on the show about a client that we had previously worked with. This client was a large national company who’s brand is a household name in most parts of the U.S. This company is a large user of Contract Recruiters – having hundreds of Contract Recruiters on-site at their various locations. We worked with this company for 3 years locally in Philadelphia providing contract recruitment services and were starting to make inroads to other geographic locations. Suddenly we found out that they had signed a contract with a national staffing firm to provide all of their Contract Recruiters across the U.S. While we understood why they were doing so (they thought they would experience a cost savings and standardization of service) we knew it would be a disaster. All we could do was sit back and wait in hopes the company would realize their mistake and come back to us. Several months later they did come back to us but it was to TRAIN this national staffing firms Recruiters. We respectfully declined.
I’d like to correct a couple of things said on the show.
I said that on one engagement that we were involved in (we were developing an internal recruitment function for a company and working with recruiting firms on the front end) 7 out of 10 candidates that were submitted by staffing and recruiting firms had never been talked to by telephone or met in person. Based on the feedback on Twitter my comment was mistakenly interpreted that this is something I see all of the time. I want to be clear that while I do see this often I was using just one example. This was a Las Vegas based gaming company who had a large staffing vendor list and no controls around the vendors they worked with. This was the worst example I’ve encountered not the standard.
The other item I’d like to correct is around our national delivery capability. While using a specific example of a company that uses hundreds of Contract Recruiters across the U.S. I said that we could not deliver nationally. We certainly can and have delivered projects across the U.S. from Tampa to Atlanta, Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas, Des Moines, Chicago, Las Vegas, Costa Mesa, the Silicone Valley and everywhere in between. In that example what I had intended to express was that we are not large enough to have executed hundreds of Contract Recruiters in various locations across the U.S. all at the same time. I apologize for the confusing message.
Thank you to Bryan Wempen and William Tincup for having me on the show and thank you to those who follow DriveThruHR on Twitter for your positive feedback. If you have additional comments please feel free to contact me on Twitter @MikeAstringer or by e-mail mike.astringer@humancapitalconsultants.com.
Here is a link to the audio from yesterday’s show: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/drivethruhr/2012/02/08/mike-astringer-at-lunch-with-drivethruhr
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