ADP Meeting of the Minds 2013 – Another Success

Gary Bragar, HRO Research Director, NelsonHall

My second ADP Meeting of the Minds (MOTM) client event once again exceeded expectations. There were 170 sessions with tracks including HR BPO, talent management, benefits, payroll, time & labor management, and personal & professional development. The following highlights the opening session and one of the general sessions I attended.

Opening Keynote by Steve Wynn

It’s no surprise that Steve Wynn’s hotel has won awards as the best place to work. At Wynn, a great customer experience is achieved by interaction with your people (i.e., employees) as only they can make others happy. To achieve human aspiration and to best serve customers, self-esteem is most important. If you can enhance self-esteem, then a single employee interaction with one guest can change the history of the enterprise. Steve views the most important person in an organization as the next person you (i.e., a guest) encounters.

According to Steve, to achieve self-esteem you need to be recognized by your boss. One form of recognition is pre-shift meetings where the supervisor asks if there are any good stories of guest interactions. That employee then gets his / her picture taken, which gets hung on the walls including in the employee cafeteria, which then motivates other employees to provide an exceptional customer experience!  Several examples of how employees have gone above and beyond the call of duty to exceed guest expectations were also provided.

RPO

Terry Terhark, president of The RightThing and Neil Efron, account manager, presented with client Tom Osmond, managing director of talent at Goldman Sachs; Neil sits onsite with Goldman in NY. Terry began with an overview of what RPO is and then Tom spoke of their journey together. Goldman has $34.2bn in revenues with 34,200 employees. At the end of 2011, Goldman signed a contract with The RightThing that commenced in March 2012. In 2012, Goldman did 7,200 hires (2,500 experienced hires, 2,000 college hires, remainder were interns).

Key drivers that led to outsourcing included:

• Leverage a scalable infrastructure to better support highly variable recruiting volumes
• Engage with a single provider for global delivery
• Reduce costs associated with onsite staff
• Partner with an experienced provider knowledgeable of best practices
• Incorporate advanced recruiting and sourcing technology, e.g. in 2010 job boards and mobile recruiting were not used.

The contract began with support for North America experienced hires via the NY office. Support is provided both onsite in NY and centralized from The RightThing service center in Findlay, Ohio. Today, The RightThing also provides support to the London office including scheduling of interviews.

Initial services included interview scheduling, coordination of travel, and job offer management. ADP resources are also leveraged for Green Card processing. In October 2012, a sourcing solution was designed for recruitment of niche specialist positions, e.g. how to hire investment bankers, which was expanded in 2013.

From the client perspective, ADP has enabled a more flexible and efficient recruiting model with lower cost including reduced administration and time dealing with issues.

Emerging is the ability to expand globally including sourcing for EMEA and then into APAC. Further recruiting cost reduction is to be obtained by moving from ~50% offsite/onsite to 60% offsite resources in Findlay.

Summary

If you are an ADP client and have the opportunity to attend MOTM, I highly recommend it for your personal and professional development and you will have fun!

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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