One of the greatest challenges in recruitment is how to adequately respond to rapid changes in hiring demand. How for instance, can companies find a flexible and scalable recruitment solution that minimises cost and risk – even as hiring needs and volumes change?
This challenge is ever-more apparent in markets, where rapid growth and development are the norm. Driven by factors such as new products, emerging marketplaces, economic efficiencies and new technologies, many companies have been forced to rethink how they go to market for their short and mid-term spikes in recruitment.
As such, when a business identifies the need for high-volume hiring, critical pressure points to the exercise will include market knowledge, day-to-day challenges, and how to choose the right solution for their unique, specific needs.
The high-volume hiring market
Demand for short-term, high-volume recruitment is increasing across the region. The need arises from rapid business changes: including mergers and acquisitions, new product roll-outs, job function centralisation, and shared service centre developments.
One or more of these changes in structure can create an urgent short-term project, which in turn requires a rapid increase in headcount, either permanently or temporarily. Meanwhile, technology, a pre-requisite to all modern recruitment, proves even more critical for success in these types of short-term high-volume projects.
Technology can offer a balance between offline and online sourcing and talent attraction. The investment put in across various mobile apps, social media platforms, search engines, databases and websites to attract the right talent to various projects, are well worth the investment to ensure successful hiring for each new project.
Challenges faced by internal HR teams
The challenge of this high volume short-term hiring is typically one of bandwidth and scale of internal HR teams. Many businesses look at outsourcing these high volume needs, leading to other challenges, namely:
- Finding a partner that can undertake delivery and accountability of an entire recruitment function – from requisition to on-boarding – within a short time frame and solely for a specific project.
- Needing the benefits of a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) solution, without wanting to commit to a full, long-term contract.
- Balancing a strong need for flexibility and agility, with a requirement for a large network of established contacts.
Choosing an outsourcing solution
Once a business makes the decision to partner with a company to outsource their high volume recruitment, it becomes important to strike a balance between cost, and finding a true partner that can act as “Brand Ambassador”. This is essential during both the go-to-market phase to source talent, as well as the pre and post placement process when the candidates are found.
This trust is integral for the successful completion of the project, and the subsequent retention of the talent hired. Therefore it is essential to choose a trusted partner, based on reputation, rapport, and overall network throughout the region in which a business is recruiting.
What does successful outsourcing look like from a hiring perspective? Page Outsourcing, whilst operating differently from a full RPO, still delivers the same benefits to the business; managing short to mid-term projects with an impressive success rate.
Case Study: Success with Page Outsourcing
Page Outsourcing partnered with a company with an urgent need for high volume of hiring in a short time frame. The goal of the project was managing these needs and fluctuation in recruitment demands, while delivering the same quality and efficiency as an RPO service.
When faced with this project, Page Outsourcing deployed a team consisting of a regional account manager and two resourcing specialists at the client site, who acted as a quality screening mechanism for all the CVs submitted whilst also communicating with stakeholders.
This three-person team partnered with the offsite sourcing team, which in turn supported them on sourcing needs. The number of recruiters deployed, as well as the size of the sourcing team, varied as per hiring volume fluctuations.
Assessment Centres and recruitment drives in various cities and countries were coordinated for bulk requirements. The entire project was managed smoothly with a single point of contact, the account manager, who helped balance the operations teams’ feedback alongside a pragmatic understanding of the client’s best interests.
With this project approach, Page Outsourcing was able to leverage a large network of contacts, blended with flexibility and agility to successfully hire 65 people over a span of three months, thus meeting the client’s targets.
Page Outsourcing also achieved a better quality of screened CVs after stringent screening parameters were put in place, and achieved a reduction in hiring time as quick turnaround time and great efficiencies kicked in.
Advantages for the client
Our client found that there were several advantages of using Page Outsourcing versus a traditional RPO to handle their needs. Firstly, Page Outsourcing required no long term commitment and allowed for the ability to turn our service “on and off”, allowing for a high degree of flexibility.
This flexibility allowed the client to leverage off our service, so they did not lose focus on the rest of their HR practices. They could then return back to normal once the project was completed, and then ultimately enjoyed the luxury to return to us for this service when and where needed.
Page Outsourcing has a presence in 12 countries in the region, giving clients all the benefits that come with global reach. A sudden need to hire high volumes of employees can be a serious challenge to any HR team in businesses across industries: and in many cases, outsourcing this hiring is the ideal solution.
Success ultimately lies with choosing the right partner, whose solution is tailor made for the unique situation that each business is facing.
Learn more about Page Outsourcing here.
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