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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Ceridian Has a Whole New Feeling

Linda Merritt, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

Ceridian just held its annual sales kick-off meeting and according to Jayson Saba, vice president of marketing strategy and analyst relations, there was “a whole new feeling of excitement.”

Ceridian Made a Big Bet

Ceridian is a mature service provider having been in payroll and HR services since 1932. So, what is causing such excitement in 2013? The answer is Dayforce HCM.

Ceridian began partnering with Dayforce in 2010, which soon led to investing in the company, and then to purchasing the company in early 2012 and forming a new business unit, Dayforce, led by David Ossip, Dayforce’s CEO.

This was a major strategic bet on SaaS as the new direction for a large portion of an already successful company with an estimated $1.5bn in revenues. How big a bet? Well, in late 2012, Ceridian made the decision to realign its sales and marketing efforts behind Dayforce HCM in North America, the company’s largest customer and revenue base!

The company will continue to support clients on its current systems and will not force migration. In fact, it will continue to invest in adding more features and functionality in key areas. Its other service lines will also continue including international payroll, benefits administration, EAP, and stored value solutions (electronic cards with preset or refillable financial value).

Dayforce HCM is a Party of One

Dayforce is a cloud-based platform built as a single application with one record, one rules engine, and zero interfaces. Real SaaS can eliminate the need to enter data in multiple systems, manage complex interfaces, and confusion about who to call when multiple vendors are involved, and it provides easier implementations.

Dayforce HCM includes:

• Payroll and tax: view, edit, fix, and preview payroll in real-time
• Workforce management: plan, schedule, and forecast labor requirements, and time tracking and compliance
• Benefits: manage enrollment, calculate eligibility, and support an unlimited number of benefit plan types
• Human resources: forms and workflows for managers and employees to manage work and life events
• Mobile: access, manage, and change schedules and other aspects of employee records including shift trading, availability, and time-off requests.

The system can scale for small, mid, and large market clients with a sweet spot in the 1,000 to 10,000 range. Ceridian already has several deployments of 15- to 30,000+ employees. Major retail clients include Aéropostale, Pier 1, and Crate & Barrel.

With a Clear Roadmap for the Future

The new system already has hundreds of clients and is available in the U.S. and Canada, and NelsonHall predicts that it will soon be expanded to the U.K. as well. We estimate Dayforce will become  the HR system of record for all of Ceridian’s HCM customers including managed and international payroll services and eventually become a global HRIS offering.

Ceridian is also working on new additions for talent management (performance management, compensation, and recruiting) and other social media features.

Nothing Succeeds Like Success

Imagine the excitement when your new system far exceeds expectations, wins awards, and delights customers. No wonder a good time was had at Ceridian’s annual sales conference!

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What’s New Again in HRO for 2013

Linda Merritt, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

Even though predictions are a perennial New Year activity, the truth is that most trends play out over many years. Most HRO “predictions” are more like annual status checks and updates.

Transformation is new again

Several aspects of our old friend, HR transformation, are back on the table for 2013:

• Operations transformation: new, upgraded, standardized, and integrated HR tools, systems, and processes
• Strategic transformation: increases in overall HR performance that improve business performance
• Accelerated transformation: the cycle of transition, standardization, and improvement needs to move at a faster pace than ever; which provider can help you get where you want to go with a track record of getting there faster?

A return to transformation fits with our NelsonHall 2013 HRO trend of value balancing cost and pent up demand for improved operations.

Even with more client and vendor maturity this go-around, we need to ensure that strategic HR transformation goes hand-in-hand with the evolution of the retained staff, HR generalists, and service delivery operations. One can either leverage and empower the other or hold back real progress in both.

Evolution and the use of new HR technologies  

Rapid technology advancement continues across all HRO services and within in each service line, providing a great opportunity for HRO buyers and a challenge for HRO service providers.

• Easy access: mobility, bring-your-own-device, and cloud-based SaaS impacts every business including HR BPO. Increasingly, not only clients, but end users are expecting the same types of access and functionality from HR as they experience elsewhere.
  • HRO providers with modern platforms can bring these technologies to clients and their employees faster and at less overall cost
  • Service provider investments and the rapid pace of introduction add cost and stress to release cycles for services rapidly becoming table stakes which could pressure margins.
• Emerging technologies: social media and analytics are new transformation tools, potentially powerful ways to improve performance of HR services and produce business results.
  • RPO leads in integrating the use of social media in recruiting, which helps RPO become a value play in the war for talent. This is a win-win: improved recruiting for clients and fuel for growth for vendors
  • Leading vendors with an active client community including early adopters will be able to create and test new and effective ways to leverage the new technologies that then can be added to service offerings. Learning vendors are already experimenting with effectively incorporating social media and gamification
  • Investments in leading-edge technologies that have not yet found breakthrough acceptance require a long view of growth and profitability, a risk that not all service providers are willing or able to take on.

From the most basic cost-reducing transactions to advanced partnerships in HR transformation, the full and growing range of HRO services has something for every organization in 2013.

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Onward and Upward for HRO in 2013

Linda Merritt, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

Each year, the NelsonHall HRO team is asked by HRO Today to make predictions for the year ahead. Here is a summary of our featured article, Onward and Upward to kick off our 2013 blog series.

HRO is reaching maturity

There is a growing level of acceptance with less perceived risk in making the HRO decision; value is balancing the focus on cost, and pent-up technology needs will be opening the door to new service provider opportunities.

• Value and cost are reaching parity for many buyers that want agile new HR capabilities that produce results, including the ability to measure and manage HR issues across the enterprise as well as improve the employee experience
• The need for core HRMS upgrades and new technology should reach the point of increased budgeted spend; be ready to discuss whether upgraded and bolt-on additions versus a new core HRMS is the better path for increasing business impact and the total cost of ownership.

Breakthrough HR technology for 2013: cloud-based SaaS

Major technology costs will open the door wider for SaaS. As SaaS offerings move “up-stack,” the ecosystem for SaaS support will continue to develop in 2013 via consulting, implementations, integrations, BPO, etc.

• SaaS HRMS adoption will continue to move fastest for mid-market organizations
• Expect little large market HR ERP near-term erosion from SaaS HRMS; but cloud-based SaaS HR platforms are disruptive technologies that will quickly move up the value chain and be able to serve larger and more complex organizations
• Total cost analysis, not just system costs, will be important in the adoption of SaaS HRMS in larger organizations; over time, the ERP per user pricing advantage will disappear, especially if evidence continues to mount of better performance and lower overall costs.

Emerging HR technologies: social media and HR analytics

There is increased interest in how to deploy the newer tools strategically. Look for adoption to slowly build as clients need a certain level of maturity in systems, services, and vision to create real value with the newer HR technologies.

The word for 2013: convergence

It may be a bit early to pick a HRO word of the year, but I think convergence will be a good candidate to cover changing client needs and new and emerging technologies.

Where, when, and how do we bring together the old and the new to create new synergistic capabilities? What can we do with a fully-integrated HRMS with HR analytics? How can we change the delivery of services with strategically deployed social media? Can we bring new magic to the employee experience with mobility and social tools?

As choices increase and grow more complex, confusion and inaction may result. With clear purpose, planning, and great advice and counsel the opportunity is before us all to create a real breakthrough year for HR and HRO in 2013.

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Accenture and Unilever Renew Major MPHRO Contract for Five More Years

Linda Merritt, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

Let’s wrap-up 2012 on a high note for HR BPO with news of Accenture’s award of a 5-year multi-process HRO (MPHRO) contract renewal from Unilever. When orginally announced in 2006, the 7-year contract was the single largest HRO deal signed with an estimated value of $1bn.

First Generation HRO

The focus of the first generation Unilever contract was largely on cost reduction (20% – 30%) and creation of a unfied global HR operating environment of systems and services across 100 countries and 20 languages. Unilver had already begun the tranformation process by introducing shared service centers in key areas to capture some of the early gains on its own as part of its One Unilever program to reduce the cost of back-office services including HR, F&A, and IT. It then moved to HRO to make further progress in efficiency, cost, and to gain a single source of the truth in reporting and mearsurement capabilities.

Second Generation HRO

Accenture will continue to support ~130,000 Unilever employees operating in more than 100 countries through its global delivery network including multiple centers across the U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific. MPHRO services include:

• Core HR administration
• Payroll administration
• Recruitment
• Learning services covering content sourcing and development, program planning and delivery, and learning system hosting
• Management and administrative services.

As is common with renewals, there are some expansions of scope and a greater focus on improvements, in addtion to a desire for further cost reducing efficencies.

Accenture will be introducing service improvements to drive greater efficiencies and improve the user experience and align the services it delivers with Unilever’s Talent Agenda. New elements include:

• Introducing a more proactive recruiting approach, including the expanded use of social media (Accenture itself has been using LinkedIn and Twitter to recruit staff for a few years now)
• Expanding the scope of the learning services delivered by Accenture to include professional skill-building modules in the curriculum to support Unilever’s focus on developing future leaders; learning programs will make greater use of virtual instructor-led training (VILT), which is in line with Unilever’s sustainability agenda
• Evolving in performance metrics to go beyond traditional operational SLAs to include metrics focused on the client’s desired business outcomes.

It is a good quarter when you can announce a major MPHRO deal, whether it’s new or a renewal. For FY Q1 2013, Accenture’s revenues were $7.2bn, up 5% in local currencies; EPS were up 10% to $1.06; and operating income was up 7% to $1.05bn. Outsourcing brought in $3.26bn in revenues, and $3.3bn in new bookings. A good quarter indeed!

Happy holidays from the NelsonHall HRO team: Gary Bragar, Amy Gurchensky, and Linda Merritt.

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The CedarCrestone HR Systems Survey and HRO: Part 2

Linda Merritt, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

To complete my review of CedarCrestone’s 2012-2013 HR Systems Survey, I will highlight some of the newer HT technology trends.

SaaS HRMS: The Breakthrough Trend of 2012

According to analysis of the survey results, the benefits of SaaS HRMS include:

• Faster time to value from deployments that take about half the time
• Improved user experience, which leads to higher usage rates
• Higher customer satisfaction.

The 50 top performers, based on financial measures, are leading the move towards SaaS HRMS solutions. Approximately one-third have a SaaS solution in place and more are planning to add SaaS in 2013.

Large market HR ERPs are still in the leadership position and face little near-term erosion from cloud-based HRMS. Near-term erosion, however, is the key phrase. Cloud-based SaaS HR platforms are disruptive technologies and as such, they are likely to quickly move up the value chain and eventually be able to serve larger and more complex organizations. In the meantime, SaaS HRMS adoption will move fastest among mid-market organizations.

Total cost analysis, not just system costs, will be important in the adoption of SaaS HRMS in larger organizations where ERPs are still less expensive on a per-user basis. Over time that pricing advantage will disappear, especially if evidence mounts for better performance and lower overall costs.

What’s Coming Next

• Social and mobile-enabled processes are increasing in user-adoption
  • RPO and recruiters are in the lead using social media as ~50% of all recruiters use social-enabled recruiting processes
  • Early adopters of social-enabled processes show a link to 8% higher revenue per employee
  • Almost 60% of respondents have some mobile enablement in their HRMS
• Integrated talent management is linked to the highest financial performance
• Organizations with business intelligence solutions that integrate workforce and other organizational data outperform by 12% over those without such integration.

Keep in mind however that the newer applications are starting from small adoption bases and have not yet reached breakthroughs.

Key Words: Integration and Standardization

Throughout the survey, the results are links to the need for integration of HR applications with the core HRMS to gain the greatest benefits, and the precursor to integration is standardization of policies, practices, and processes. For example:

Integrated talent management on the underlying HRMS platform attains the highest financial performance at the lowest cost and can lead to 50% lower BI costs.

HRO service providers can help clients with the initial standardization needed for creating an integrated HR technology platform, whether it will be ERP, SaaS, or a hybrid system. Buyers: have a clear plan and consider getting help in investing, deploying, and using the new tools strategically to create business results. It is harder than it looks!

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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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The Parable of IBM and Kenexa: Part II

Linda Merritt, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

It’s common for major HRO announcements to be followed by a conference call, and sometimes one-on-one briefings are also offered for analysts as in the case of the IBM and Kenexa deal.  Naturally, the NelsonHall HRO team including myself, Gary Bragar, and Amy Gurchensky took advantage of both opportunities.  

IBM’s Own View

The initial announcement was largely from the perspective of the IBM Social Business group that will add Kenexa’s HCM capabilities to its combination of social media, content management, and analytics. IBM believes that this creates value through the application of social technology to front office processes and generates ROI by creating social networks of expertise that leverage analytic insights to improve business processes. In sum, a “Smarter Workforce.”

It is the Whole Elephant…

In Part I, I compared the various views of the IBM and Kenexa news to the analogy of the blind men and the elephant. The answer is that all of the following interpretations are rationales of the deal:

• Builds upon IBM’s social media, analytics, and professional services including BPO
• Brings valuable software, HRO expertise, as well as talent management capabilities
• Increases competition and cross-selling to both IBM’s and Kenexa’s base of Fortune 500 customers
• Delivers value to C-suite executives, HR executives, and the whole value chain of management and employees.

…and Much More

The IBM Global Process Service’s HRO team was involved from the start and will be deeply involved throughout the integration process. RPO services will be combined creating an even bigger global footprint with new service centers including three in the U.S. Kenexa’s learning platform will be reverse engineered to support IBM’s learning services. There are also other parts of Kenexa that can be kept or spun off such as compensation services, behavioral sciences surveys and assessments, and middle market customers.

Kenexa will be a wholly-owned subsidiary for the first year to allow time to determine the best options for unleashing the full value of the deal. Kenexa brings innovative and collaborative intellectual capabilities and a portion of the value is greater than the “stuff” that can be divided up. Even with Kenexa’s leadership intact, the decisions will be many, with lots of players due to the matrix nature of the services and opportunities adding to the normal M&A complexities.

IBM’s Smart Workforce incorporates the concept of the boundary-less enterprise that works across the “whitespace” between processes and organizational silos. IBM wants to make human capital management an integral part of business operations by enabling people to unleash their talent when, where, and how it is most needed to create measureable value.

We each see the world through our own lens of experience and expectations, and sometimes the truly new and innovative “elephant” is harder to see. IBM and Kenexa can create the truly new and we should all hope they do. HCM, HR, HRO, HR tech, IT, social media, and more will have to raise their game to benefit from the new technology, services, and consulting opportunities. And that is a good thing!

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The Parable of IBM and Kenexa: Part I

Linda Merritt, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

I have not seen such a range of varied opinions from members of the HRO and HR tech communities as those about IBM’s acquisition of Kenexa. The commentary showed that many were taken a bit by surprise and weren’t sure how to analyze the news that IBM was acquiring Kenexa for $1.3bn.

IBM Bought Kenexa?

The surprise was not the purchase of Kenexa, which was foreshadowed by the acquisition of Taleo by Oracle and SuccessFactors by SAP. It was more about the fact that IBM was doing the purchasing.

A few  thought that ADP might make such an acquisition since it had already expanded its benefits capabilities with Workscape and SHPS and its RPO capabilities with The RightThing, so wouldn’t talent management make sense? Speculation continued, perhaps Mercer, Ceridian, or even ADP would be the target of an acquisition or merger.

IBM itself was considered likely to continue its acquisitive ways with something more in the talent management / HCM space. Likely targets mentioned included Cornerstone OnDemand, SilkRoad, SumTotal, Saba, with a few suggesting Halogen, Peoplefluent, and others. In short, someone is going to buy something else.

The Meaning of the Deal?

What does this mean we all asked, much like the tale of the Blind Men and the Elephant as was suggested by the leading light Naomi Bloom. Early viewpoints on the acquisition included:

• Continuing IBM’s move into social media and analytics
• Continuing IBM’s move into professional services including strengthening RPO
• Disrupting the HCM market and becoming a talent management player
• Delivering value to the HR executive
• Delivering value to the C-suite and bypassing HR
• Primarily being a HRO deal with some software attached
• Primarily being a software deal with some HRO attached
• Upping competition with SAP, Oracle, Salesforce.com, and even Workday
• Selling into Kenexa’s IBM-like customer base of Fortune 500 clients.

IBM’s news crossed many markets including HRO, HCM, HR tech (software, platform, cloud, etc.), BPO, social media, talent management, and financial and market analysts. Each commenter viewed the same information through the lens of their personal perspective and professional interest, much like the blind men touching different parts of the elephant.

With so many options before it, including IBM’s own announced intentions for the addition of Kenexa, the opportunities are new and exciting. Given the inherent complexities, IBM will face many risks as well. Look for more on The Parable of IBM and Kenexa coming in Part II.

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RPO, A Bright Future on the Path to Business Impact

Linda Merritt, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

The future of RPO is bright with growth opportunities in every area of the world. According to NelsonHall’s “HRO Market Forecast 2012 – 2013,” RPO will remain the fastest growing area within HRO.

RPO is still evolving as a service line, moving from back-office paperwork administration to the front lines of recruiting, predictive assessment, and employer brand management. Contract renewals and extensions are now a regular part of the RPO news stream. Among those with announcements of renewals and extensions are:

• Alexander Mann Services
• Capita
• Manpower Group
• Novotus
• Pinstripe.

RPO is not for the faint of heart

With great opportunity comes increased risk. Growth is seldom in a straight path upwards and RPO is also on the leading edge of any business downturn that impacts hiring. It is not uncommon to see up and down swings in revenues of 20% or more between good and bad years. RPO providers need to be ready to rock and roll incredibly fast and be flexible in responding to changes in demand while balancing its own core of subject matter expertise.

RPO is the trail blazer

It is hard for any business including HRO service lines to keep up with new technologies, global service delivery networks, social media, and open device access. To recruit highly skilled multi-generational talent anywhere on the planet, RPO needs the latest tools and technologies to bring capabilities to employers they could not easily and affordably duplicate.

RPO has a direct path to business impact

Dr. John Sullivan, a respected HR thought leader, recently said that RPO has the greatest business impact of any HR function. Dr. Sullivan is referring to The Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) “Realizing the Value of People Management from Capability to Profitability” research that rates the relative business impact of different HR functions on growth and profitability.

This was a major study of over 4,000 respondents across 102 countries, comparing the difference in revenue growth and profit margins at firms with “very high capability” individual HR functions to the business impacts of “low capability” HR functions. The firms studied had been named to Fortune’s “100 Best Places to Work For” list at least three times in the last ten years; their stock price growth was then compared to the stock price growth of the S&P 500. The “best companies” with great HR saw their stock price increase an average of 109% when the S&P 500 rose only 10% over the last 10 years, up to 10 times higher. Wow!

BCG found that the top ten performing HR functions in rank order were:

• Recruiting
• Onboarding and retention
• Managing talent
• Employer branding
• Performance management and rewards
• Leadership development
• Mastering HR process
• Global people management and global expansion
• Enhancing employee engagement
• Providing HR shared services and outsourcing.

In addition to the good news for RPO, the broader picture is the need for integrated talent management and the boost for HR outsourcing. Great HR can and does directly support great business results, and great RPO and HRO can be a part of that success story.

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