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CEO's Corner RPO and the "Global" Rebound The 2011 magazine RPO Baker's Dozen Customer Satisfaction Survey is completed. It is always an exciting and exhausting time of year. My compliments and deep thanks to Elizabeth Boudrie, who heads research at SharedXpertise, and Debbie Bolla, our managing editor, for their hard work in managing the process. We collected 466 certifiable surveys from 266 companies. This represents the largest and most industrially and geographically diverse survey sample ever collected of the RPO buying community. We want to thank all the participants for sharing your feedback with each other and with prospective buyers. It is a great service you do for the HR community at large, and we are proud to provide a vehicle through which your voice can be heard and through which this peer-to-peer to learning platform can be facilitated. Last year, we saw a modest dip in overall satisfaction numbers in RPO. I attributed this to what I called "industrial indigestion." In 2009, the rebound in hiring left many RPO firms confused about whether they were seeing a "blip" or a trend, and they were slow to add resources. Service quality suffered, as they had too few recruiters carrying too high a load of requisitions. "Time to fill" metrics ballooned, and processes slowed. This effect played out in the data we collected. We also saw some buyers complain in the comments sections about resources and resource allocations. In follow up as part of our research report practice, we discovered from the practitioners that the providers they were struggling with had been the "very low cost" bid that was "too good to turn down" and had very low contractual minimums or virtually no fixed costs. Hmmm! There is a message there about value propositions that are "too good to be true". Your cost level determines your resource level. Low cost may mean low-level recruiters, and recruiter inexperience leads to unfilled jobs. Remember: the cheapest RPO engagement is the one . Of course, the successor firm to that failed provider will handle the position (from which you have been terminated) as their first requisition; so don't make that mistake. For the most part, the RPO firms have made good deals, and providers have been judicious in their selections and configuration of programmes. Outcomes have been good, and market growth has been strong. Overall satisfaction has rebounded. In spite of strong market growth of an estimated 35 to 40 percent in North America, the scores on some key items are shown in the table below. The scores are on a five-point Likert Scale, so these are very high, and we see this high distribution from the RPO buying community as a general rule. These overall satisfaction numbers had drifted down closer to the 4.0 level or even the high 3's in last years' survey, so this is a strong rebound in performance for the provider community. The other phenomenon that is clearly evident is that RPO is going to global deals. As you will see, of the top 13 providers, nine are on the global leaders list—with more than two clients for which they are performing services in more than two global regions. Of the four companies that did not qualify, one has a subsidiary that does international work that operates in other regions, and the other two each have global partnerships. My provider has improved our staffing function since we have outsourced to them. I trust the executive my provider has assigned to my account. The team assigned to my account does a very good job managing staffing operations. This provider honors their commitments. This provider operates within the parameters of their Service Level Agreements. My overall experience with outsourced recruitment solutions has been positive. Overall I am very satisfied within this provider. Based on my experience, I would recommend this provider to other organizations. 4.24 4.51 4.34 4.45 4.38 4.41 4.37 4.42 The message is less about what providers offer than it is about what practitioners are buying. They are starting to buy multi-country deals or, at least, buy in one region and expand scope to include other regions. Many of the global companies that are buying global programmes are U.S. and European multinational firms, but we are also seeing APAC-based conglomerates now purchasing outsourcing and extending their provider agreements into the West, which is a new phenomenon driven by the vibrant growth in the Eastern hemisphere. It has been another year for the magazine RPO Baker's Dozen Customer Satisfaction Survey, and, more importantly, the RPO industry. Read on, and we hope that as in past years this is helpful as you decide how to manage your staffing and recruiting operations. [4] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | SUMMER 2011 Elliot H. Clark, CEO CEO: Elliot H. Clark Elliot.Clark@SharedXpertise.com Managing Director: Faye Holland Faye.Holland@SharedXpertise.com Editor-in-Chief: Dirk Olin Dirk.Olin@SharedXpertise.com Managing Publisher: Gale Tedeschi Gale.Tedeschi@SharedXpertise.com Managing & Online Editor: Debbie Bolla Debbie.Bolla@SharedXpertise.com Director of Marketing: Carlos Fernandez Carlos.Fernandez@SharedXpertise.com Marketing Manager: Carina Tam Carina.Tam@SharedXpertise.com Contributing Writers: Russ Banham, Katie Kuehner-Hebert, Brent Skinner Webmaster: Michael Fernandez webmaster@SharedXpertise.com Subscription services: For subscriptions, renewals, changes, and back issues, email subscriptions@SharedXpertise.com. About HRO Today Global magazine HRO Today Magazine [ISSN #1541-3551] is published [10x] by SharedXpertise, LLC © 2010. All Rights reserved. URL: www.HROToday.com. 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This magazine cover is printed on 80# Influence Recycled gloss and the inside pages on 50# Influence Recycled gloss, both with 10% post-consumer recycled content. HRO T oday that fails to fill jobs HRO T oday

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