Beyond RPO
Few areas of business have as many variables as recruitment and resourcing. Natural attrition amongst the workforce, fierce competition for the top talent, uncertain and elastic headcounts in times of hardship, rapidly changing employment law and sheer logistical nightmares are just some of the pressures on HR departments and business leaders. With so much to think about, it’s hardly surprising that not everyone does resourcing well – and some barely do it at all, relying on decades-old means of hiring and firing that put them at serious competitive disadvantage.
Many modern forces conspire to make life even harder. Globalisation, in particular, is giving many organisations a big headache. Finding and keeping the best people locally is hard enough, but the problem is magnified enormously when replicated in unfamiliar territory. And if that wasn’t enough, today’s organisations have the fallout from the global recession to deal with too – a process in which recovery, and the workforce issues it raises, may turn out to be almost as difficult as surviving the recession itself.
The last few years have demonstrated beyond all doubt that shifting the problem elsewhere is no longer enough to guarantee prosperity or even survival.
For much of the last decade, many large businesses have tried to deal with these issues by outsourcing to specialist recruitment organisations. Such recruitment process outsourcing, or RPO, has worked well when times are good and business is predictable. But the last few years have demonstrated beyond all doubt that shifting the problem elsewhere is no longer enough to guarantee prosperity or even survival. That needs wholesale transformation of the recruiting and HR functions – transformation that is beyond the abilities of RPO alone.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that today’s businesses need help with a whole new set of problems that existing structures simply cannot cope with. Expansion into developing nations – an ambition of many large organisations – is just one example. Attracting workers to an unfamiliar brand is hard enough without the linguistic, cultural and legal barriers to deal with too. But more prosaic problems exist closer to home, not least in the restructuring and rethinking of human resourcing in the aftermath of the economic downturn. Few organisations can do these things for themselves; and even fewer organisations can help them address the full range of problems and opportunities that they face as we move through the second decade of the 21st century.
What are the opportunities on offer to your business and what challenges do you face? Leave us a comment and let us know!
Best,
Dave
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David HeathDavid Heath is Director of International Business and people Capital at Alexander Mann Solutions |
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