New, unique, different
With Talent charting a new course via its latest service offering in creating an RPO division, the global digital and technology recruitment specialist is in rapid scale-up mode. Forget the conventional approach though. As General Manager Tom Mackintosh explained, Talent had some big questions to answer. “How are we going to be different from the main large RPO providers that have been around for decades?
“How do we support different parts of the market that perhaps they’re not servicing? So our objectives really are to find new, unique, and maybe slightly different solutions to problems, people problems that other companies aren’t necessarily seeing or wanting to address.”
It was therefore imperative that the company looked for a recruitment solution offering that was “scalable, from start-up right up to enterprise,” which would enable them to segment some of their customers both vertically and horizontally, with Talent “drilling down into different job functions, business units or geographies and addressing the customers’ needs in those respects.”
A clear front-runner
Tom had been a beta user of JobAdder at his previous company and so when the topic of what technology Talent needed to deploy for their new RPO division arose, there was a clear front-runner. “A number of things stood out for me…ease of deployment and set-up is one of the things as well as the month-by-month rolling contracts which is absolutely crucial.
“I made a decision to look at more recently developed tech because it’s far more intuitive and JobAdder, particularly, is very intuitive to use. It also has an open API, which is really important to me as we’ve seen an evolution in HR tech which has best-in-breed stacks now as opposed to closed ecosystems.
In addition, JobAdder is “very good from a proactive sourcing point of view. And I think a lot of the in-house tools are quite reactive in nature.”
The advantage of rapid deployment
He cites the ease of deploying JobAdder as a competitive advantage, particularly in light of traditional large-scale enterprise systems typically having a very long sales cycle, and a long, very structured deployment. “Sometimes they can take three months easily because there’s so much change management within a very large company,” said Tom, adding “we can deploy very quickly and JobAdder allows us to do that. We can spin up an instance of it within a day.
“So one of the key things that JobAdder allows us to do for our target market is this rapid deployment. And that’s really, really important for us. That serves as a differentiator, as we can be highly effective at meeting the customer’s requirements within a matter of weeks, whereas traditional RPOs often take a few months.”
Best-of-breed stack
Despite only being in the RPO space for twelve months, Talent has already won five RPOs / project solutions and all very different deployments by way of sector and locations. One company had never had an in-house recruitment function before. “So we’re building everything from scratch and working with JobAdder has been great, because it means that I can build a best-of-breed stack,” said Tom, adding that he could then use the JobAdder marketplace to “link that solution all the way through from requisition management to arranging onboarding,” automating many of the processes using additional partner plugins.
“So that’s been a perfect example of where the technology can be very simply deployed. That company has gone from 100% external agency recruitment to, in the last twelve months, zero external agency use.”
In another RPO case, Talent had to use JobAdder in conjunction with an existing ATS, which didn’t suit the local market’s requirements. “The ATS didn’t allow for proactive recruitment very easily. JobAdder allows us to integrate with this ATS, enabling us to pipeline candidates, resurface previous candidates that have been dropped into the database and advertise locally where the other ATS doesn’t allow for local job board integration. In short, JobAdder allows us to short or long list candidates for roles prior to then having to put them through the process driven by the company’s ATS. Because of JobAdder’s flexibility and ease of use, that’s very simple to do.”
Meanwhile, another of Talent’s RPO’s helped a Fortune 500 business’ New Zealand tech division source internationally, given the candidate-short market they were faced with. “JobAdder allows us to tie into international job boards very easily, which means that we can get their brand out into regions they don’t usually have access to,” explained Tom.
A winning mindset
Moving forward, Tom sees the potential that JobAdder has in terms of RPO scalability. “I could see it scaling with us as we evolve, but also be used for short-term engagements, what we call mini-RPOs or what we call Talent360, as an augmented solution. We would typically go to a customer who’s having a hiring spike or has a project-based requirement and help them for 6 to 9 months. JobAdder is absolutely ideal for that. And for longer-term growth as well,” he added.
Talent has big plans for its RPO division, looking to cement their identity and offering in Australia and New Zealand, as well as launching in the UK, Europe as well. “Really it’s about establishing ourselves into a certain market before we start to push in wider growth,” said Tom. For Talent, that comes down to the team going to market as a specialised digital RPO provider, of which there are very few.
“Some enterprise businesses are saying, well, let’s look at our cost-per-hire or difficulty in hiring and they are in very specific verticals. Let’s carve that off and RPO it to one company and leaving their core hiring with a generalist supplier or we can keep it in-house for example,” he said.
So will Talent be going after those enterprise clients?
“The short answer is yes, we do look at enterprise. The long answer is, yes, but only where we think we can truly add value as a specialist outsourcer, where recruitment is focused on technology, digital, data or sales roles, with volumes of 50 to 500 hires a year”
