Randstad Sourceright Analyst Day 2014: RPO In High Gear

Last week Randstad Sourceright held its first analyst event. Services covered included MSP, independent contractor solutions, technology, RPO, employer branding, veterans hiring initiatives, and career transition services.

My focus here is primarily on Randstad Sourceright's RPO activity.

RPO in High Gear

In 2014 YTD Randstad Sourceright has secured high double-digit RPO contracts, of which one third were project-based and two thirds were multi-year contracts. Several contracts are global, including a global engineering client headquartered in NY, for whom Randstad Sourceright performs recruiting in 50 countries.

In addition to obtaining new clients Randstad Sourceright has been expanding its relationships with existing clients by a stronger focus on account management.

Randstad Sourceright highlighted:

• Its efficiency and standardization with an increased shared vision approach with its clients
• Its differentiators such as CoEs in areas such as strategic sourcing and recruiting, employer branding and social media, diversity & inclusion, talent identification & assessment, technology, reporting & analytics
• Its flexibility, including its ability to scale quickly and its virtual approach (described below)
• The quality and loyalty of its employees, with just a single digit attrition rate. Approximately 80% of the entire RPO workforce is virtual, enabling reduced real estate costs. Recruiters also keep engaged by participating in a Google+ community, where they can share both work and home-related information (described further below under candidate engagement).

Business priorities include:

• Being responsive to increased demand for globalization
• Leveraging the Randstad organization, in geographic reach and for significant peaks
• Investments in technology and its CoEs
• Strong executive support

In addition to the above, I attribute Randstad Sourceright’s success to an increased focus on employer branding and candidate engagement.

The employer branding portfolio has standard service offering and separate consulting services. All new clients now receive the standard offering as part of implementation. By Q2 2015, Randstad Sourceright will roll-out its standard offering to all incumbent clients.

Candidate engagement: all recruiters must be certified in Randstad Sourceright’s total talent sourcing methodology. When new recruiters join, they must pass three levels of certification within 120 days. The most advanced, Level 3, includes advanced diversity sourcing, more in-depth military sourcing, how to build customer search engines, natural language search, etc.

In addition there is a community for recruiters to join on Google+. Members share best practices and strategies that have worked. There are also videos explaining “how tos”, plus a global sourcing call on Google Hangout to talk about what recruiters are struggling with and to obtain help.

Randstad Sourceright appears to be building momentum under its new President of RPO.