Firms outsourcing entire hiring to private recruiters

With all-time high attrition rates and shortage of skills making companies go into a hiring mode, recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) services are gaining popularity in India.

Companies such as MphasiS, Wipro, Accenture and others are outsourcing a big chunk of their hiring process to recruitment services vendors to bring in more efficiency, both in terms of candidate appraisal and costs. It also helps them cut overall recruitment time.  

Amitabh Das, founder and CEO of recruitment services firm Vati Consulting, says Indian customers are now moving beyond outsourcing just the CV appraisals and asking them to screen candidates till the final round.

This, he says, is because companies want to concentrate on their core business. Also, with RPO services, recruitment processes and HR requirements get more streamlined for the customers.

“With the recovery in the economy, firms are now expanding their business, and recruiting quality manpower has become an arduous task for them. This is making them outsource most of the processes to a third-party vendor,” he said.

Typically, an RPO deal starts with the service vendor first receiving the requirement from clients. The same is discussed with the technical managers and the requirement is broken into primary, secondary, mandatory and preferred skills. 

The next step involves the client evaluating the technical competency of the vendor’s panel members to give the final nod.

Once this is done, the process of sourcing, short listing and scheduling of candidates for telephonic interview is initiated. The conversation is then recorded and the interview valuation sheet is collected along with call-transcript.

Finally, the candidate profile, evaluation sheet and the recording is shared with the client and the schedule of the shortlisted candidate is prepared for the final technical round of discussion.

This is followed by the HR round with the client to complete the hiring process. The RPO partner has access and is expected to comply with all internal tools and process, including employee referrals of its customer.

Tech major Accenture has been outsourcing its entire recruitment process to RPOs for some time, and now companies like Fiserv, ITC and others are also slowly getting their recruitments done from service vendors.

Global services company Fiserv was able to slash its hiring budget by 25% by shipping out most of its recruitment process to an RPO firm.

“These are still early days, but I feel more and more companies would look for it as a good RPO service provider can help organisations build scalable recruitment teams, predictable delivery mechanisms and at the same time get better cost options,” said Syed Kaleem Raza, general manager - recruitment, Fiserv.

He believes speed and low cost are biggest advantages of RPO firms. “But one needs to be careful against agencies that claim to be RPO but are nowhere close to it. Also, if the agency is not competitive enough, there can be wrong people on the board which will bring a bad name for the company,” warned Kaleem Raza.

Narayanan Nair, global head - staffing, MphasiS, said RPO enhances the overall delivery capability with focus on managing scalability and growth without increasing the size of internal staffing organisation.

However, he said, it is important that a RPO firm has the wherewithal in terms of financial strength and competence to manage the full-fledged process.