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.

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In Times of Crisis, HRO Is Caring and Concerned: Part 2

Linda Merritt, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

Some think caring emergency response may be compromised by HRO, but response capabilities can be better with HRO. Major vendors have multiple service centers and back-up capabilities at levels above what is economically feasible for most organizations. Also, customer care and concern abounds when HRO vendors maintain an internal culture that values and recognizes customer service.

Care and Concern

Experienced HR people make up much of the client-facing service representative staff at HRO vendors of every sort and HR people are wonderfully caring folks, whether they are on your payroll or a service provider.

• Being There: As mentioned in Part 1, Mercer was prepared in case they took a direct hit from Superstorm Sandy in the Boston area. When needed, Mercer will put up available service personnel in nearby hotels. Even though some folks were personally impacted, 75% of the staff showed up on Monday and 90% showed up on Tuesday.
• The Spirit of Service is Global: Jodi Hayes-Roth, North American Service Delivery and Operations Leader at NorthgateArinso (NGA), said their representatives feel very loyal and connected to their clients and make every effort to be present even though there are back-up centers available. The spirit of service is as strong in client service centers like Manila as it in the U.S. or Europe.

Practice What You Preach

To have staff remain dedicated to their clients, they need to be treated with the same care and concern. Both NGA and Xerox have client service centers in the Philippines where typhoons and monsoon flooding can impact business services and personal lives. A great business continuity plan (BCP) addresses both issues.

• Outreach: When the NGA Manila office was impacted by flooding, there was outreach to contact and ensure every employee was safe and accounted for and the team raised funds to help co-workers in need.
• Safe Shelter: Michael Sigmund, General Manager of Operations at Xerox, recounted what happened when a monsoon hit the Xerox Manila service center that supports many of Ford’s global employees. The building is built with hurricane-standard materials and a generator back-up system and there are sleeping quarters to provide safe shelter for staff and their families. While work can be shifted to the partner center in Michigan, Xerox invested in keeping local employees safe and the employees wanted to support their customers. Even though short staffed, they kept tier 1 services operating while some tier 2 work was transferred. In return the team was recognized at a Ford leadership meeting.

There are many more stories out there of people working anywhere they could find Wi-Fi, getting to work without transportation, and carefully monitoring transfers to protect service levels even in the midst of a declared multi-state disaster.

Recognition of people that demonstrate a high sense of ownership is important.  Aon Hewitt, Mercer, NGA, and Xerox all shared great examples from formal to informal and local to enterprise-wide recognition that they provide. 

Stay tuned next week for more on HRO business continuity planning.

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Spotlight on Infosys BPO and HRO: Growing, Growing, and Growing

Amy L. Gurchensky, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

Since its inception 10 years ago, Infosys has experienced great growth and success. Its fiscal 2012 BPO revenues were $495m, more than tripling since the $147m it reported in 2007. To support its growing client list over this period, Infosys has nearly doubled its headcount to more than 21k employees and has added 16 international centers to the two centers it had in 2007.

 The company provides a balanced mix of horizontals from finance and accounting to sourcing and procurement to customer service, and of course HR.

In addition to its multi-process HR outsourcing (MPHRO) offering, Infosys’ standalone HR BPO offerings include:

• Payroll
• RPO
• Learning.

The company has a very strong HRO client base in North America, which accounts for 45%. The remainder of its HRO clients are fairly distributed between Asia Pacific (30%) and Europe (25%).

While Infosys’ HR technology offering is very strong, its HR BPO business has been steadily growing, and the company is aggressive with its target revenues for HRO over the next few years. With its planned growth initiatives, I believe it has a very good chance of meeting its targets due to its:

• High client retention rate
• Ability to expand existing contracts to grow with its clients
• Healthy pipeline with the possibility of a multi-process HR outsourcing (MPHRO) win in the near future.

My overall impression of Infosys at their recent analyst day was that they are genuinely nice warm people who really listen and are transparent. All qualities which I highly admire, and apparently qualities that are valued by two of its existing clients that came to speak during the analyst day:

• A North American headquartered banking and financial services company
• A U.S. headquartered media company.

Other reasons why these clients selected Infosys for BPO services included:

• Executive attention
• Trust to do the right thing
• A broad offering for future growth opportunities
• Flexibility
• Technology capabilities.

The lesson reinforced by these clients is that organizations are looking for service providers who listen and genuinely understand them so together, they can create a strong, lasting partnership where both companies prosper in their respective area of expertise.

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HRO Confidence Continues to Soar!

Our recently published Q2 2011 HRO Confidence Index indicates that 50% of HRO suppliers, which includes payroll, RPO, learning, benefits, and MPHRO vendors, are much more confident in the HR Outsourcing business over the next twelve months compared to the previous twelve month period.  Thirty-five percent are slightly more confident and 15% are as confident.  The driving factors are two-fold.  The top reason is new contract activity, first reported as the main reason in Q3 2010, and the other reason is increased scope of existing contracts.

In the past, my colleague Linda Merritt and I have written about new contract awards. For this blog, I wanted to focus on the importance of contract renewals, including increases in scope expansions as they are closely following new contract activity as the reason for this high confidence in HRO!

A few examples of recent contract renewals and scope expansions include the following:

• Last week, Genpact was awarded a 7 year MPHRO contact by Nissan to include payroll, recruiting, training, and benefits administration.  Genpact had been providing HR services to Nissan group companies and affiliates.  It has also been providing services outside of HR that included F&A, procurement, collections, customer service, and analytics.  As part of the contract, Genpact acquired Nissan’s HR shared service center in Yokohama, Japan, which handles HR functions for 54,000+ employees globally. The center, renamed Genpact Japan Service Co., Ltd., will serve Nissan, its affiliates, and other Genpact clients.
• In June, NorthgateArinso was awarded a 7 year MPHRO renewal and scope expansion by Fifth Third Bank that I wrote about in my blog on the 23rd.
• In June, Pinstripe was awarded two RPO contract extensions and scope expansions by Johns Manville and Rayonier. For Rayonier, the scope was expanded  from professional hires for one division to include all professional and hourly hiring for all divisions.
  • In April, Aon Hewitt was awarded a flexible benefits contract by Emap, a business-to-business media group in the U.K.  Aon’s Risk Solutions business had already been providng services to Emap.
  • In addition to winning a total retirement outsourcing (TRO) renewal earlier this year with BP America, Fidelity Investments also won a  5 year contract renewal for TRO in North America by HP, adding 162,500 participants from EDS who were previously serviced by other providers.

I believe we will of course continue to see contract renwals, but within the next one to three years, we will see an even larger increase in scope expansions.  Why?  Although buyers are increasing their propensity to outsource, since the recession began in 2008 we’ve seen new HRO buyers treading more lightly to test the waters before diving more deeply.  A common example I see is in recruiting, where a new contract may start out for a particular business unit or geography, but then expand based on client satisfaction and increased benefits to enterprise-wide RPO, similar to the Pinstripe example above. When these contracts come up for renewal and the clients are happy, having  obtained the benefits they signed up for and maybe even had their expectations exceeded, then there’s a good chance these clients will be looking to increase whatever scope they can.

We’ll come back to additional findings and trends in our HRO Confidence Index in a future blog, but in the meantime , NelsonHall clients can view the full report at the NelsonHall website.

Gary Bragar,  HR Outsourcing Research Director, NelsonHall