Pinstripe’s RPO Analyst Day: Talent Forward

Gary Bragar, HRO Research Director, NelsonHall

I attended Pinstripe’s analyst day on May 15, 2013. It was combined with its Client Talent Forward Summit, with the theme “Commitment to Innovation”. Highlights of the day included:

Client Panel

Pinstripe discussed 10 recent innovations, of which a panel of four Pinstripe clients then discussed a few Pinstripe innovations that have benefitted their business, including:

• Email campaigning: A proactive approach to creating candidate pools with active and passive candidates. This enables messaging a high number of candidates with relevant information – such as familiarizing candidates with potential hiring company announcements; e.g. “Did you happen to know we were named one of the best places to work 4 years in a row” or “We were rated as the safest operating room to work in St. Louis”. Email Campaigning has resulted in a two-to-three times increase in passive candidate responses
• Video interviewing: Both live and prerecorded interviews of candidate presentations. Managers feel more informed of when to take candidates to the next step. Team interviewing is also conducted
• Employment branding and social recruiting: All about making a connection with the candidate to “get them in the door”. Includes training and education on how to properly use social media to send out positive messages.

Client Tour

We toured the Brookfield facility where ~60% of employees work. The tour included:

• Understanding how employees are recognized
• How virtual employees are connected and communicated with as though they were onsite in Brookfield
• Demos of some of the innovations, including email campaigns to build talent pipelines
• A visit to the Impression Center.

The Impression Center, which receives 250k calls per year, is staffed by customer service experts who are imperative to potential candidates’ first impression of the company. Applicants and candidates can call the center with questions throughout the job offer, and live chat is also offered. First call resolution is 96% with 97% customer satisfaction. Over 63k interviews have been scheduled by the Impression Center. Candidates may still contact the recruiter if needed; however, by using the Impression Center there has been a 97% reduction of calls to recruiters, allowing them to focus on their primary concern – recruiting.

Pinstripe Analyst Briefing

Pinstripe has grown from ~450 employees and ~73,000 hires in 2011 to ~575 employees today and nearly 100,000 hires in 2012. Most recruitment contracts at Pinstripe are end-to-end, full service RPO as opposed to projects. Several of the more recent contracts have been second- and third-generation RPO clients. Pinstripe’s partnership with Ochre House, formed in 2009 to deliver RPO in EMEA and Asia-Pacific, has been awarded several contracts to fill multi-regional hiring needs. Both companies attribute their success to sharing similar values. Honeywell is an example of a second-generation client now expanding beyond North America to Europe that Ochre House will serve. Combined with Ochre House, RPO is provided to ~85 clients in 45 countries in 23 languages.

Summary

One of the key messages taken from this summit is that Pinstripe is keenly focused on the candidate experience and a positive work environment for its employees to excel at satisfying client needs. It is therefore of no surprise that Pinstripe recruiters have an average of >9 years’ experience.

Interested in reading the latest HRO news from NelsonHall? Subscribe to our newsletter by clicking here.

President Obama to Reward Companies That Invest in the U.S.

In the USA Today last week, there was a feature with President Obama giving a talk to the business community, where he gave recognition to them for keeping jobs in the U.S.

The President said the economy has changed, and the transformation has been painful for many American workers who used to work in factories where they thought they would retire from, but those factories relocated overseas where the cost of labor has been cheaper. The President recognized that we live in a global economy and other countries want to develop their companies internationally and will therefore want to employ workers all over the world.  But right now, the U.S. is in a unique moment in time where it has the opportunity to bring jobs back as the U.S. has people available and ready to work now. The President wants companies to invest in America, and he is set to introduce a tax proposal that would reward companies who bring jobs back to America and eliminate tax breaks for companies that are moving jobs overseas. The President has set a goal of doubling the export of goods and services by 2014.

So the big question is, will this scheme work and what does it mean to offshoring HRO? As one data point, let’s look at the percentage of HRO contract value by location according to NelsonHall’s latest quarterly HRO Confidence Index released in December 2011:

• 72% Onshore
• 16% Nearshore
• 12% Offshore (the 12% is consistent with April 2010 when tracking of this data point began).

Although some American companies have brought back previously offshored jobs, I believe it will come down to a combination of cost and service. First, pending what the actual tax breaks are that the President will be able to provide, CFOs will evaluate the outsourcing cost savings vs. the tax benefits of bringing jobs back. If HRO service provider jobs are brought back, vendor clients are not going to want to pay more. If the tax breaks don’t cover the labor cost savings, will vendors be willing to eat the extra cost? I don’t think so. Much will also depend on the current level of client satisfaction with outsourced services.

Depending on job type, it is easier said than done. As an example, let’s take moving outsourced call center jobs back to the U.S. Part of the reason call centers are offshored are due to multi-lingual call center support, including for MNCs, that can be provided from HR service centers such as in Manila. Then there is offshoring of non-client facing jobs, often referred to as back-office administration. For example, sourcing of jobs can be done when U.S. offices are closed overnight and candidates can be delivered next morning.

In sum, once the specific tax breaks are known, CFOs will commence cost savings analysis, followed by vendor and client discussions on where and how to best provide HRO services.

Gary Bragar, HRO Research Director, NelsonHall

Interested in reading the latest HRO news from NelsonHall? Subscribe to our newsletter by emailing amy.gurchensky@nelson-hall.com with “HRO Insight” as the subject.

HRO and a Culture of Analytics: Part 2

Service level agreements (SLAs) are probably the most thought about key metric connected to outsourcing. Operational metrics that measure process performance are important. The practice of measurement can also be innovative and strategic.

Let’s stay with IBM as an example and move to the HRO services group, which serves almost 2m users in 99 countries with 29 languages.  I spoke to several IBM’ers including Kerry Violette and Janet Hunter.  Both are a part of IBM’s HRO efforts to enhance the employee experience, increase customer satisfaction, and use intelligence and innovation to enhance differentiated value aligned with IBM corporate goals and initiatives, including the Smarter Planet agenda.

One of IBM’s new programs underway to enhance the employee experience is the “Next Generation of Measures,” and several new HRO contact center metrics are being trialed.  When complete, the new metrics will be rolled out to all clients.  Better measures rely on better data. Cleaning up data and adding more fields takes a certain amount of client effort and IBM is working first with those clients who are ready to step up to a new level of contact center activity analysis.  In addition to the data tracking efforts, client employee users will be surveyed about the contact channels used and will assess the level of effort expended to reach resolution.

IBM HRO, led by Mary Sue Rogers, was an early leader in creating a client advisory group, which encourages feedback, input into prioritizing improvement investments, input about the creation of new service offers, and cross-client sharing and learning.  As clients will tell you, and the IBM HRO team knows, it is not uncommon to “see green, but feel blue” when using traditional SLAs.  And yet, understandably, contractual service metrics focus on the services and processes that are under the vendor’s control.  Another 2011 initiative, Beyond Sat 360, is designed to go beyond contractual obligations and cover processes end-to-end, including client and even third party components.  The program will also aid IBM’s assessment of current drivers of customer delight and retention.

Beyond Sat 360 is an outgrowth of both corporate initiatives and the client user group.  It will take a deep dive view of processes to identify opportunities to reduce nonproductive time and effort for both parties and identify the biggest bang for the buck improvements.  Current HRO clients may opt into the beta test and help develop the program and its deliverables.  Data collection and analysis, reports, and dashboards will be a big part of the program including client participation in diagnostic interviews and surveys.  IBM is partnering with Clear Picture/Organizational Metrics to support the research.

The assessment opportunity is free to participating beta clients. If successful, who knows, this could become a new service offering, as have other programs that started with the client advisory group.

How is your HRO vendor using measurement in innovative and strategic ways to improve their services, provide you more value, and deepen the client relationship?

Linda Merritt, Research Analyst, HRO, NelsonHall