Just a quick note about a cool new product that hit the scene. Check out HarQen (rhymes with “Darth Vader’s Colleague the Gran Moff Tarkin) product called VoiceScreener at VoiceScreener.com. I demoed it last week and was nicely impressed.

The tool isn’t necessarily groundbreaking in it’s scope, but the execution is quite impressive. In a sentence, they allow you to do automated, recorded, standardized telephone interviews. Essentially you email a link out to a candidate and when they click it, they are instructed to enter their phone number and the system calls them, and records their short answers (3 minutes or less) to several standardized questions.  The system then allows you to replay the recorded answers at will and rank (1-5 stars) the quality of the answer to quickly determine which candidates are worth a more detailed call from a recruiter.

I can imagine a number of uses of this system.  I think it would be great for pre-screening for positions where communication skills and phone presence are very important, and it could also be great for any position where the answer to a single question can make or break a candidate (including technical positions where you could ask something very open like “please describe your experience working in a Ruby on Rails environment).

This candidate-rich environment is perfect for testing out new products and tools to improve the recruitment efficiency of your business.  Pinstripe has been vocal about how well the system is working for them, so it’s definitely worth checking out.  The price starts at $7 per competed screen, but goes down by 2/3 or more with volume.

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Pinstripe recently posted an article on their blog arguing that the failure of an RPO program does not mean that RPO will never work within that company and providing five reasons why companies should give RPO another try.

While I agree wholeheartedly with their premise, I also know that there are situations where an RPO program fails to achieve its goals, not because of the provider, but because of the client.  A wise man once said “Remember, the common thread between all your failed relationships is YOU”.

Here are five things to help you, the RPO buyer, turn the mirror on yourself before assuming that simply replacing your RPO provider will fix the problem.

1) Have you faced adoption issues?  (i.e. are you struggling getting hiring managers to work with your provider).  If so, you need to consider if this is due to your provider’s failed change management efforts, or if your company simply has a cultural bias against outsourcing which may not be fixable - or may be fixable but require additional change management efforts driven by your own senior leadership.

2) Have you had problems with other outsourcing initiatives?  If your company has historically struggled to outsource successfully in the past, there is a pretty good chance that an RPO program will not find fertile ground within the organization.

3) Have you allocated enough budget for your provider?  If you bought from the low bidder, and then squeezed them down another 10% you may have not left enough margin for them to operate successfully.  Maybe a slightly higher investment will allow them to deliver at higher service levels.  If you are getting push-back from your provider because some special request is outside of the statement of work, or not covered in your service level agreement, it’s a good sign they are watching their pennies, and that  may cost you in the long run.  If you just can’t allocate more budget, maybe RPO isn’t for you.

4) Have you placed overly restrictive process requirements on your provider?  If you brought in an RPO provider to re-engineer your process, but then required them to operate within legacy technology, utilize outdated assessment systems, and copy all resumes onto stone tablets for extra redundancy (Ok, I made that one up), it’s possible you have hobbled their ability (and any other provider you bring in under those same requirements) to deliver.

5) Have you reviewed the specific hiring environment of your organization for intrinsic challenges?  From employment brand, to compensation design, to industry reputation, any number of factors outside of the control of your provider can make it especially challenging to attract candidates to a specific company.

In most cases, an open and honest conversation with your provider will unearth which (if any) of these challenges exist within your situation.  Keep in mind that providers don’t like to be seen as “complaining” about your company and the challenges they may be facing, so they may initially be reluctant to share their opinion on some of these issues.  I’ve always been a fan of the “No Career Limiting Moves” meeting in which everyone agrees to be open and honest, and all parties agree not to hold anything that is said against the other party.

If you hold such a meeting, you may identify things you can do to help your provider be more successful.  On the other hand, maybe you just picked a horrible provider, and another one would do a much better job.

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I’ve had a few people send me links to cloudrecruiting.net and their video about cell-phone recruiting.  I’ve reviewed both and am creating a new industry award to bestow upon them.

The Hyperbole Award for most beautifully packaged presentation which tells us nothing new but looks like a million bucks - therefore appearing to be groundbreaking but really being a waste of our valuable time goes to: Cloudrecruiting.net.  The presentation you can view on that site looks like a million bucks but I didn’t walk away with anything new or actionable.  Maybe I’m jaded, but it seemed like a repackaged view of things I’m hearing from a LOT of people.  The idea that recruiters need to be socially networked and use text messaging to recruit younger workers doesn’t break a lot of new ground in my mind.

I was particularly bemused because the site describes the presentation as: “Hard on the heels of a ground-breaking presentation delivered at SourceCon 2008, Michael Marlatt similarly wowed the audience at the ERE Fall Expo with his thought-provoking and eye-popping presentation.”

Michael, I’ll give you eye-popping, but ground-breaking and thought-provoking is a stretch.  I don’t mean to sound snarky - I appreciate anyone putting their ideas out there, but I think this was over-sold and under-delivered.

Hmmmm.  Over-sold and under-delivered, there has to be a message here somewhere that is specific to RPO…I just can’t put my finger on it right now (smiley face emoticon etc.)

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I saw an interesting article on the “Infection Greed” blog (http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/03/has_the_us_layo.html) showing a graph that may appear to show that the growing layoff trend is actually trailing off.  The graph shows layoffs peaking in January and dropping in February.

I’m not quite as rosy as they are in looking at these numbers for two main reasons:

1) The spike in January layoffs from December may be caused by company’s who simply didn’t want to bad Karma (or bad press, or bad feelings) of laying off staff right before the Christmas holiday, and put off the inevitable until January.  This pushed some December layoffs into January, under reporting the December numbers and over reporting the January numbers.  This makes February approximately flat from December and January.  Given that layoffs cost company’s cash in the short term (PTO payouts, termination expenses etc.) I also wonder if the January spike was also an attempt to massage FY08 numbers by pushing those expenses into FY09.

2) Large, public companies (who account for a lot of this layoff activity) tend to be swayed by their stock price and public perception of their performance.  I think everyone got a bit of a free pass for the last few months as investors blamed “the economy” for everything but largely didn’t point the fingers at individual companies.  I think investors are done with that view and are now watching individual companies like hawks and seeing how management is handling the recession.  Management doesn’t have much more time to start acting aggressively to make cuts and return to early 2008 profitability levels.  I expect we are going to see a lot more layoffs in the months to come as management make the tough decisions required to thrive in this economy.

What do you think?  Is the worst over, or are there darker days yet to come?

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Evidently, making fun of Snuggie is more popular than boring talk about RPO.  I’ve had quite a response to my snuggie post and wanted to share the following two links which were forwarded by loyal blog followers (blolowers?)

1) Snuggie mentioned on the freakanomics blog at:

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/security-blanket-with-sleeves/

2) A  NSFW (Not Safe For Work - but very funny) parody of the snuggie commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h05ZQ7WHw8Y&feature=channel_page

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I recently listened to the cockpit audio from Flight 1549 which crash landed on the Hudson river last month.  You can find the audio with some video below.  What I find amazing about this is the absolute calmness that the pilot shows.

Given that the recruitment industry as a whole lost power in both engines in November of last year, and the forecast for RPO is pretty bleak throughout the rest of the year, I’ve heard a lot of panic in the voices of various RPO leaders I’ve spoken with.  But now is not the time for panic.  If anything, now is the time for calmness and a blank slate look at your organization.

I’d recommend that the leadership of all providers take a hard look at their business and make the decisions they need to make to ensure the survival of their company.

• Staff - don’t carry excess capacity.  It may be painful, but cut once and cut deep and get your business sized appropriately for what you have coming in right now.
• Expenses - travel, entertainment, cable TV, employee benefits, 401k matching - everything must be on the table for discussion.  Don’t be afraid of your employees.  In this market they aren’t going to quit because you stop sponsoring Beer Fridays or free dry cleaning.
• Sales and Marketing - ramp up expenses in anything that directly leads to new business.  Whether it’s pay-per-click, direct mail, or hiring additional salespeople, if you can tie a dollar spent to a few dollars of revenue, it’s a good investment.
• Vendors - talk to your vendors and see if they can help you control expenses.  Especially if you overbought and now need to ramp down, you have nothing to lose by asking to renegotiate.  Monster.com is notoriously unflexible (yet another reason so many people REALLY hate them, but that’s for another post), but a number of smaller ATS, job board and other companies may be willing to work with you.
• New revenue streams - there may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are probably 100 different ways to make money in the recruitment space.  A number of companies are coming into the RPO space to help create additional ways to monetize.  If you haven’t already, take a look at BountyJobs and GetListed.com

Above all, remain calm.  It’s impossible to take an analytical view of your (shrinking) business if you are panicked.

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I saw an infomercial today for a ridiculous product called the “Snuggie” which is essentially a blanket with sleeves build into it.  Seriously, I’m not making this up - check out www.freesnuggie.com

What struck me about this commercial is that they manage to communicate two separate ways in which the features of a regular blanket are inferior to a snuggie (specifically, blankets can slip, and you can’t reach for things while you have a blanket over you).  Now I don’t know about you, but I have never experienced either of these problems, nor have I felt that there was a gap in the lap blanket market which was begging to be filled.

But the lesson I took from this, and why I think the masterminds (and I use that term loosely) behind snuggie’s marketing are right on the mark is that they not only explicitly describe the benefits of their product, but they attempt to create dissatisfaction with the incumbent product.

As you market your RPO practice, think about snuggie.  Do you CLEARLY describe the benefits of your services?  Do you describe your services in such a way that you create dissatisfaction with the status quo (usually internal recruitment function or employment agency?)

A few hints:

• If you are selling RPO then Better, Faster, Cheaper are not benefits - they are features.
• We developed a list of at least eight ways in which RPO is substantively different from and better than a contingency search firm - how many can you come up with?
• We developed a list of at least six ways in which RPO is substantively different from and better than an internal HR or recruitment function - can you think of more

From my understanding of the infomercial business, if the product doesn’t sell, they will stop airing the infomercials very quickly.  Given that snuggie has been running for a while, they must be selling the things and probably making millions.  Let’s take a lesson from the snuggie playbook and maybe we will all be so lucky.

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The most important lesson in RPO (heck, probably in ANY business) is to play to your strengths.

I remember the frustration I felt in my early days because we never seemed to win any RFPs.  We’d have a GREAT meeting with the client, they loved our solution, we knew our pricing was competitive, and we wrote a GREAR RFP response.  But despite all this, time and again we would lose out to larger providers.

It finally dawned on me one day when I went back and re-read some of our old RFP responses - it was obvious from reading the RFP questions that we were weak in two areas that were critical to winning Enterprise deals - technology and financial strength.  EVERY RFP we got asked technology questions we had to dance around and asked for financial data which we were uncomfortable providing.  Meanwhile, our larger competitors had slick annual reports and teams of technodweebs to trot out in their RFP responses.  The reason we were losing these deals is that we, as a small company, were trying to compete with the big boys on their territory, and they’d beat us every time.

Once we realized this, we stopped responding to RFPs, and focused on winning deals where the relationship and the quality of our service was more critical than the depth of our financial backers.  Suddenly we started winning deals.  We were playing to our strengths and the results showed.

So in this tough economic climate, here are three tips for the small and medium RPO provider to help focus on playing to their strengths and avoiding playing to the strengths of your competition.  I’m not going to provide tips for the large providers because, heck, they’ve got the big bucks and have a lot of strengths to play to.

Small Provider

1) Don’t waste time chasing monster deals.  In this climate, buyers are very unlikely to going to go with a small provider .  If it’s a large competitive bid, walk away and focus your time elsewhere.

2) Analyze your current client base and focus your sales and marketing efforts on the two to three niches where you have the deepest and most convincing case studies.  Those niches may be geographical, industry-based, or specific position-types.  However you define it, you should only be selling into a market where you can answer the question “what success have you had doing EXACTLY like what I need?”  If you excel at filling Physician’s Assistants in Pennsylvania, then market yourself as the experts in filling PAs in PA.  Remember, if you try to be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing to no one.

3) Emphasize customization and flexibility.  You can’t beat the big boys (and girls - Hi Sue and Anne at Pinstripe) on price, you can’t beat them on resources, but you can out-flex them all day long.  Make sure your sales and marketing message emphasizes your ability to morph to meet client needs.

Medium-Sized Provider

1) Be VERY selective at picking the RFPs you respond to.  If you haven’t met a client face-to-face, remember that someone else already has and they have the inside track.  Insist on an in-person fact-finding meeting before preparing your response.  Ask the tough questions to make sure they will consider working with a mid-tier provider or if politics will force them to pick a large national firm.  Remember, they used to say “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”.  In RPO that might be “No one ever got fired for buying Adecco (or Spherion, or Manpower etc.)

2) Invest your resources in delivering a powerful first 72 hours of service to each new client and each new hiring manager.  Once you’ve won a client, they’ll decide in the first three days if they made the right choice in selecting you.  Craft a client intake and new client launch process that knocks their socks off.  The smaller providers generally don’t have the resources to craft a truly remarkable new client experience, and the kargest providers tend to be challenged in personalizing and customizing service delivery.  Use this to your advantage.

3) Give your best clients “office of the chairman” service.  If you are CEO or owner of an RPO firm, you should be talking to your best clients AT LEAST quarterly if not monthly.  Clients love this level of service and they recognize that they are getting special attention.  For smaller firms, the attention of a Senior Executive doesn’t carry the weight it does for the medium sized companies, and for the largest providers, the CEO rarely has time to dedicate to this level of granular customer relationship building and maintenance.

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Without exception, everyone I speak with in the RPO industry experienced a dramatic slowdown in their business starting in October or November of 2008. The consensus seems to be that business dropped off between 25% and 50%, with most companies experiencing a 35-40% drop. Most of these same companies are predicting an upswing starting at the end of 2009 or early 2010, with some more pessimistic companies predicting that a recovery won’t come until 3rd or 4th quarter of 2010.

Since most believe an upswing will occur in the foreseeable future, the strategy for this period has shifted from a growth or even sustaining strategy, to one of survival. I believe that those who will weather the slowdown best are the largest and the smallest providers, while the middle-sized ones will suffer the most.

Obviously the largest providers have the most financial resources and their risk is spread across a largest client base, with a larger spread both in terms of geographic spread and industry. Many of these providers (Adecco, Manpower, Kelly, Spherion) also have diversity in the types of staffing they provide and can focus on other parts of their business like temporary staffing as the RPO market cools.

At the same time, while the smallest providers don’t have the diversity or financial resources of the large ones, they have the ability to be nimble, and turn on a dime. As the market shifts, they can respond most quickly to niche opportunities in the market. Also, the smallest providers tend not to have expensive infrastructure and they can contract primarily by laying off or redeploying staff.

The middle-sized providers (100-300 employees) however, tend to have a more sophisticated (and therefore expensive) infrastructure and enough levels of management that they can no longer turn on a dime. Without the financial strength of the largest providers, they may find themselves struggling the most in this downturn.

As in any downturn, the companies that will thrive will play to their strengths and focus on the parts of their business where they have a sustainable competitive advantage.

In my next post I’ll put forth some ideas for small, medium, and large providers to implement immediately to play to their unique strengths.

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In a previous post I discussed how the financial crisis is driving some baby boomer retirees (or Reluctantly Returning Recent Retirees - or RRRRs as I’ve dubbed them) back into the workplace.  I promised to follow up with some specific ideas you can put into place right away to target this market, so here goes.

1)    Downplay software requirements in your advertising and posting.  Many RRRRs are self conscious about the difference between their technological expertise and that of younger workers.  While they may have perfectly good computer skills, they are less likely to be confident in their ability to learn new systems quickly.  Let’s face it – today’s younger worker master a new technology every 3 months and they facebook/twitter/text/iPhone effortlessly.  You CAN teach an old dog new tricks, but it may take a bit longer.  If you want to attract RRRRs, you should use language that makes it clear that, while you require a certain level of computer expertise, you provide training on the specific software utilized by your company.

2)    Emphasize your need for EXPERIENCE.  The one thing RRRR’s bring to the table that their younger counterparts don’t is years of experience.  Make it clear your organization is actively seeking individuals who bring years of experience to the table.
3)    Emphasis transferability of skills.  If you are open to career changers coming from other industries, make it clear that the skills they gained in their previous career can help them succeed in this new, exciting opportunity.
4)    Simplify your online application process.  I have seen online applications as easy as e-mailing in a resume, and as complex as 27 pages of data capture over a 45-minute timeframe.  The longer and more complicated your application process, the more you risk alienating a potential employee.  Remember, anyone 40 or older remembers when submitting a resume involved typing out a resume on heavy weight stationary and putting it in an envelope.  The online application process is foreign to any baby boomer who hasn’t looked for a job in the last 15 years, to keep it as simple as possible.
5)    Focus group your employment brand with a few baby boomers.  While you can certainly hire a firm to do this (and I’d be happy to quote you on a SharpObject Consulting run employment branding focus group), you can get a pretty good idea of where you stand by simply asking a few boomers to go to your website, look at the employment pages, and apply for a few jobs online.  Everyone has a parent or cousin or aunt or uncle who they could enlist to do this.  Make sure you ask for at least five different opinions so you aren’t weighing too heavily on any one person’s opinion, and then ACT on the feedback you get.

This is only scratching the surface of a true targeted program, but hopefully if you take these ideas and add a few of your own, you’ll be on the way to reaching out to the talent you need to build your business.

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