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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RPO Generation 2.0 is Ready to Go

Linda Merritt, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is one of the younger HRO service lines and it is both growing and maturing quickly. The March issue of HRO Today recognizes the emergence of RPO 2.0.  NelsonHall’s RPO specialist, Gary Bragar, would certainly agree. Gary’s October 2012 Targeting Recruitment Process Outsourcing market analysis highlighted many of the same developments in this rapidly growing HRO segment.

What is New in RPO 2.0?

The rapid growth and incorporation of social media for recruiting is a big part RPO 2.0, one that keeps pushing RPO to the leading edge of innovation in the HRO space.

RPO services are rapidly moving up the value chain, and changing client expectations is the key. While reducing the cost of service provision is always on the table, it is no longer the number one issue. Flexibility and scalability will always remain important as well, given how quickly hiring needs can change.

Today’s RPO 2.0 clients are looking for more value:

• Improved quality of hires
• The latest tools and technologies for social and mobile
• Expertise in accessing talent pools and passive hires
• Greater focus on candidate experience
• Analytics and insights, in addition to metrics and reports
• Improved retention
• Access to advanced services including employment branding, talent management, talent engagement, and integration with workforce planning.

Clients Simply No Longer Want To Do It

In the last few years, many buyers reduced internal recruiting staff in line with the reduced volume of hires, and they do not want to rebuild and reinvest in the rapidly evolving technologies and advanced skill sets it takes to succeed in today’s competitive, social, mobile, and global recruitment process market.

Buyer Choice is Broad

For every large staffing company that does RPO including Adecco, Kelly, Manpower, and Randstad, there are smaller vendors that specialize in RPO such as Ochre House and Pinstripe.   Most leading RPO vendors of all sizes can offer services in most of the regions of the world as they have partnered and made acquisitions to make their footprints global.

Not long ago, major multi-process HRO (MPHRO) providers either did not provide end-to-end RPO or saw it taken out of contracts. Now, more MPHRO providers have full RPO services strong enough to be offered as standalone services including ADP, Aon Hewitt, Infosys, and IBM.

With RPO 2.0 You Can Have It All

While having it all may still be a bit aspirational for most of us, we are finding evidence that successful client / provider RPO partnerships can improve process efficiencies (e.g., reduce time to hire 20% to 50%), reduce the total cost of hire (often 20% to 30% or more), along with increasing hiring manager and candidate satisfaction.

Imagine what we can achieve with RPO 2.0!

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Global Clients Join Analysts at Futurestep Showcase

Gary Bragar, HRO Research Director, NelsonHall

Congratulations to Futurestep on a job well done! The company brought several clients to the entire analyst event as well as Futurestep leaders from EMEA, APAC, including China and New Zealand, North America, LATAM, and all functional leaders.

Korn/Ferry

Parent company Korn/Ferry CEO Gary Burnison shared his perspectives on leadership including how employees want to be part of something where they can grow and be stimulated and what Korn/Ferry can do to better work with clients and help them make their business successful; it all boils down to its people! Korn/Ferry understands that companies focused on people outperform the market in terms of growth by linking its business strategy to its talent strategy.

Futurestep Offerings / Capability

Continuing its people focus, Futurestep CEO Byrne Mulrooney talked about a new career development tool called Forte. Career development is a top reason why employees stay with a company. Forte will be deployed throughout Futurestep starting with the top 100 people. Futurestep has also begun to market Forte globally to complement (but not replace) talent management platforms.

Regional and practice RPO leaders talked about how Futurestep makes a difference including its focus on:

• Understanding customer needs: per a recent OI RPO client satisfaction survey, Futurestep achieved top ranking in understanding client needs; I believe a leading factor is that a high percentage of Futurestep employees sit on site with clients
• Sourcing, assessments, talent communications/employer branding, contract management, technology, the recruitment process, vendor management, and metrics
• Its ~800 professionals in 20 countries organized by industry sectors with specialists including:
  • Life sciences
  • Financial services
  • Consumer/retail
  • Technology
  • Industrial
  • Government/public sector
• Building talent communities in all RPO contracts at no extra charge
• Using analytics with a dashboard to look across all RPO clients for benchmarking purposes.

Futurestep’s analytics, included for all new clients and to be added for existing clients by Q3, allow users to:

• View detailed data and trends including productivity, job placements by job type and gender, the top seven markets for the top seven functions, etc.
• Perform predictive analysis, e.g., top sources of hires.

Futurestep Clients

Of all analyst events I’ve been to this had the highest number of client attendees and case studies combined with presentations and dialogue around the table. Clients talked about why they outsourced, why Futurestep was chosen, benefits received to date, and what they would like to receive in the future. For example:

• An APAC client is going to use Futurestep for internal candidate hiring next
• Another client is looking to enhance its employment branding
• A North America client plans to expand globally with Futurestep including in EMEA
• A MNC client changed providers because it found Futurestep to be more of a consultant and partner.

Case studies provided examples of documented benefits obtained by clients including:

• Reduced agency hiring
• Cost savings
• Reduced time to hire, including time to deliver a short list of candidates
• Hiring manager satisfaction, etc.

Summary

I was impressed by the ability to speak directly with clients and Futurestep leaders across all regions and to learn about Futurestep’s capabilities.

Kenexa’s Analyst Day and 7th World Conference – A Winner: Part 2

Gary Bragar, HRO Research Director, NelsonHall

For the last couple of years, Kenexa has been rapidly growing its RPO client base globally and 2012 has been no exception.

Recent RPO wins include BOSCH, FMC, and BT, all of which have been multi-country awards. It also has two additional RPO contracts pending. Reasons cited by the clients for selecting Kenexa for the new contracts include:

• Quality of hire
• RPO experience including engineering and technical recruiting
• Cultural fit with Kenexa
• Global capability
• Flexibility of solution design.

Further information on the pending contracts will be released soon on NelsonHall’s website.

The customer panel at the analyst event included United Healthcare (UHC), AMD, and Fluor.

AMD:

• Issue: AMD’s global salesforce and internal formal training were not meeting its needs.
• Solution: Kenexa implemented its social LMS, which helped employees gain access to experts quickly.
• Result: AMD went from 39 separate websites of products and training to one LMS with Kenexa that is hosted to eliminate IT and technical issues.

UHC:

• Issue: UHC had a decentralized team, poor technology, low hiring manager satisfaction, and other metrics did not exist. It was hiring ~11,000 employees per year and wanted to standardize services and deploy a consistent system, starting with non-exempt hiring for a call center and extending into some exempt level recruitment.
• Solution: Kenexa is using a hybrid delivery model of service center and onsite employees. Monthly and quarterly business reviews are conducted that include reviewing metrics such as on-time delivery within 26 days, acceptance rates, class fill rates, and candidate and hiring manager satisfaction.
• Result: UHC is expanding the contract from the U.S. to include Europe (U.K., Ireland) and APAC (Philippines).

Other developments at Kenexa include:

• A new RPO COE in Raleigh, NC (others are in Shanghai, Dubai, Buenos Aires, Krakow, Vizag (India), and Frisco (TX))
• Fit Compass, which includes an interview guide that the hiring manager receives with custom questions tailored to each candidate based on the outcomes of the Fit Compass Assessment and an onboarding tool, Personal Fit Planner, to ease the transition from candidate to employee. It can also be used for development, career planning, and team building.

With each RPO engagement, Kenexa begins with an analysis of the client’s culture; it then trains its recruiters on educating the candidates and what it’s like to work for the employer. Some clients also include additional services. For example, Whirlpool’s contract also included a career site, social media, employment branding, and marketing.

At the Kenexa World Conference on October 17^th, I attended two sessions:

• Improving Quality of Hire at the Entry Level: A Strategic Application of Assessment, by Home Depot: Home Depot screens hundreds of thousands of candidates each year for hourly in-store positions and needed a more strategic method. It implemented Kenexa’s large library of assessments and Kenexa’s 2x BrassRing to improve the quality of hire and efficiency.
• RPO 2.0: Creating the Hybrid Model, by PAREXEL: PAREXEL’s original five year contract with Kenexa was to end in 2011, but it renewed and implemented a hybrid model. Kenexa’s services include sourcing, screening, and candidate interview management; PAREXEL retained strategy, candidate relationship, job offers, and reference checks. The two companies work effectively side-by-side meeting with hiring managers to understand their needs; outsourcing is transparent to the client and SLAs have mutual accountability.

In sum, it was a fulfilling analyst day and World Conference. I look forward to the next IBM Kenexa Analyst Day, which will include a smarter workforce track.

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HRO Carrying On Despite Slow, Decelerating Economy

Amy L. Gurchensky, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

For those of you who are not aware, NelsonHall assesses the confidence in the HRO market on a quarterly basis. The report involves surveying HRO suppliers from all disciplines to get a pulse on the market.

 From time to time, my colleagues and I will blog about these results. I thought I would take a step back and re-examine HRO supplier confidence levels since the report began.

 As the name suggests, the supplier confidence level measures how confident HRO suppliers are in the future market with a level of 100 representing no change in confidence.

Since the report began, the index has constantly shown a healthy level, despite some fluctuations in between. The following chart graphs HRO service provider confidence levels since its inception.

HRO Supplier Confidence Chart

2011 shows a major turning point in HRO vendor optimism, revealing a downward trend line that coincides with the Employment Situation report produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There is no need to panic though. It appears that supplier expectations are now more accurately aligned to pipeline activity, which showed a slight weakening in Q1 2012. Again, the most important thing to remember is that the indices are still at a healthy level.

Despite the headwinds from the economic recovery, business for HRO has carried on as evidenced in the following contract activity:

• ADP: awarded a multi-country payroll contract by HP covering ~130,000 employees in 40 countries across Asia Pacific (excluding India), Europe, and the Americas (excluding the U.S.)
• Fidelity: awarded a DC administration contract by the University of Washington for ~31,000 employees; it is now the sole recordkeeping provider for the university
• Talent2: awarded a three year RPO contract by Bankwest in Australia providing full RPO services from job requisition through onboarding including employment branding, establishing an innovation program for sourcing, and more
• IBM: awarded a learning services contract by a government entity in South Africa including content development and delivery of learning
• Aon Hewitt: renews and expands its multi-process HR outsourcing contract with BMO Financial Group for payroll, workforce administration, H&W administration, recruitment services, and compensation administration covering 46,000 employees in the U.S. and Canada for eight years.

There will likely be continued challenges from clients such as stalled decision-making or demands for lower pricing, and some service lines will fare better than others in this slow economy that is decelerating.

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Employment Branding: Business, Culture, and HRO

Yesterday, I participated in a very lively online Twitter discussion about employment branding. Branding is a common topic for businesses, particularly for corporate, product, and service identities. Employment branding is important to ensure the attraction and retention of employees that can deliver the business brand experience. Meghan M. Biro’s brand humanization concept is that it is all connected: the business brand, its culture, and its ability to attract and retain talent. That connectivity is a business opportunity for HRO, think RPO and employment branding services, and it is also an issue for HRO service providers as employers.

In an earlier blog this year, I concluded that HRO will not hinder and may even help clients achieve human capital leadership, using leadership and best place to work awards as evidence. Diversity award lists from DiversityInc.com and Diversity MBA magazine have just come out for 2012 and again we see recognition of HRO service providers including Accenture, ADP, and IBM, as well as many companies that use HRO. Here are examples from the world of RPO:

• Alexander Mann Solutions: Citi and Deloitte
• Futurestep: General Mills and Kaiser Permanente
• KellyOCG: GE
• Kenexa: Verizon and U.S. Navy
• ManpowerGroup Solutions: Wells Fargo
• Randstad SourceRight: AT&T and Capital One
• The RightThing, an ADP Company: Kellogg and WellPoint.

As part of my long running theme on talent management, I believe strongly that HRO vendors can and should be leaders in creating the agile workforces of the future. Part of being a leader is practicing what you preach, which is largely what corporate and employment branding is about.

In HRO service providers often need to scale up and scale down quickly, while still ensuring a full slate of experienced subject matter experts. On top of that, many HRO service providers base client care centers and processing centers in talent competitive markets, which often stimulates high turnover and brings together workforces from very different cultures. This is the second challenge of employment branding for HRO, as employers, each service provide needs to build a differentiated employment brand and corporate culture to attract and retain the talent needed to fulfill its business brand.

Part of developing an employment brand is determining what attributes make a particular employer a good place to work and developing programs to ensure those elements are in the workplace and recognized by current and prospective employees and are aligned with business outcomes. Sounds simple, but it surely isn’t.

Buyers, ask your HRO service providers about their workforce practices to see if they practice what they sell. Service providers, in addition to client testimonials, engage and leverage your own employees as brand ambassadors.

Linda Merritt, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

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End-to-End RPO Unplugged

New contracts awarded by RPO specialists often say end-to-end services are provided, however many times only two or three recruitment services are actually stated in the press release, which begs the question what is end-to-end RPO?  Does it really include all RPO services to the client or is it just jargon to sound good?

In my recent RPO report, I’ve defined core RPO services and identified the full suite of RPO services.  Frankly, most vendors offer pretty much all services, but who is actually providing what?

Having worked for many years on the client side, I know how difficult it can be to work through public relations for an announcement. Ultimately, when you do, how much detail you are able to provide is another story. Congratulations to Adecco for not only winning an RPO contract last month with SI, a provider of systems engineering and integration services to the U.S. Intelligence Community, Department of Defense, and other agencies, but for also defining its full suite of RPO services that includes:

• Applicant tracking system
• Employment branding
• Research
• Talent market mapping
• Social media sourcing strategy
• Candidate pipelining
• Direct, indirect, and Internet sourcing
• Candidate screening, assessment, and selection
• Job offer management
• Onboarding
• All recruitment administration.

Although you might say this is an end-to-end offering, Adecco does not call it that, but rather full lifecycle services.  I don’t really think it matters what you call it, but it’s better to spell out more than a couple of components when using robust terms.

Beyond the core services of sourcing, screening, assessment and selection, job offer, onboarding, and administration are emerging services, which include employment branding and the use of social media for recruiting. With the direction the world is headed in with the use of social media, you need to be “LinkedIn” to the appropriate social media communications to find the right talent in addition to the traditional methods such as job boards as they have not gone away yet.

There are an increasing number of clients who will look to an RPO provider for assistance in developing and communicating the right employment brand to attract and retain talent that will stay. Success in providing both basic and advanced end-to-end RPO services that deliver will also create client and vendor partnerships that last and prosper.

Gary Bragar, Lead HRO Analyst, NelsonHall

Top Topics at Last Week’s HRO Europe Summit

Although a working trip for me – as a learning session co-presenter with Raytheon, and on two panels, one on learning and one on RPO – I can easily say last week’s HRO Summit Europe got great marks in my book. About 40 percent of participants were buyers – a rare occurrence at conferences these days – with the balance being presenters, providers, analysts, press, researchers, staff and others. Discussions were lively and engaging, and…need I say anything about the beauty of Amsterdam, especially its architecture and canals?

My co-presentation with Raytheon, a learning outsourcing session called, “Bridging the Customer-Provider Divide,” was immediately followed by the learning panel, and witnessed buyer questions including: 1) What role does the retained HR learning organization play, including the role of the retained learning director, HR business partners and governance team?; 2) What lessons learned should a buyer that has just implemented a learning BPO contract incorporate?; 3) Why we are seeing more selective LBPO contracts and less full LBPO contracts?; and 4) What role does LBPO play in retaining knowledge as more employees will inevitably begin to retire? 

While tracks and presentations covered the HRO gamut, two of the major focuses were talent issues and RPO. Dr. Peter Cappelli, Director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of Business, opened the conference with a keynote entitled, “A Question of Talent.” He began by discussing that, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, 24 years of service with just one company was the average tenure per employee. At the time, companies invested heavily in continuous training, and believed in lateral and upward mobility. He then moved to the sobering stats of today’s workforce. Companies of course still want loyal employees, yet very few do little to give their employees in-turn loyalty, and only one in four of succession plans are utilized. The result is organizations spending thousands of dollars in employee development, only to lose them to competitors.

It almost feels as if organizations accept this as a looming cloud norm in today’s workforce environment. But I vehemently oppose that viewpoint. If you look at the pure financials alone, conservative estimates are that it costs one and a half times as much of an employee’s salary to replace that individual due to the cost of recruitment, development, learning curve, etc. How can that possibly be perceived as good business? I am feeling like an evangelist as I’ve written about it so many times in my blogs, but employee satisfaction and robust initiatives focused on talent retention are vital to competitive advantage and business growth.

One of the largest and most well attended tracks at the conference was on RPO. I was also a member of an RPO panel discussion entitled, “Deep Dive: Driving the Future State of RPO,” along with Alexander Mann Solutions, SourceRight Solutions and a professor from Lancaster University. One question posed by a buyer member in the audience was how RPO has evolved. Each panelist, of course, had its own answer. Mine, not surprisingly as an industry analyst, is that by providing what I call “value-added services” or what I consider to be the “richer RPO services,” you are a true end-to-end RPO provider. This means: 1) services on the front end in workforce planning, talent strategy and employment branding to ensure the right employees with staying power are hired; 2) services in the middle to manage internal recruiting/mobility; and 3) services on the back end, including robust onboarding and ongoing, bi-directional employee engagement.

There are other shifts occurring, including interest in global RPO, and I will cover more on that and learning outsourcing issues discussed at the conference in upcoming blogs!

Gary Bragar, Lead HRO Analyst, NelsonHall