Sevenstep RPO held its second annual analyst event last week. In addition to analysts, advisors, vendor leadership, and key service providers, practitioners/buy-side clients also attended for the day, including Commonwealth of MA, Amazon, and CVS. Here I discuss a few key take-aways.

Sevenstep RPO overview

With ~300 employees, Sevenstep RPO has global delivery centers in three countries, and onsite and remote employees delivering RPO in 47 countries across 6 continents.

Clients use Sevenstep services at a number of levels, including Enterprise RPO (e.g. Aetna), Project RPO (e.g. Amazon), Blended RPO (e.g. Toshiba), Data Analytics (e.g. CVS Health), Employer Branding & Talent Attraction (e.g. Equifax).

The company has 94% staff retention, and 97% management level retention. ~60% employee growth has come from internal staff promotions. Client retention is >85%, and >80% of clients have had their SOW expanded.

In 2017, Sevenstep will achieve 25% all-organic revenue growth, more than double the 11.4% overall RPO market growth rate forecast by NelsonHall for 2017.

Employee care focus

~20% of employees work remotely from onsite or at home. Sevenstep created a new position, “flexible workforce”, to scale clients quickly, using staff working flexible hours. This not only meets client needs (an example being quickly scaling a client from 12 to 80 hires), but also in meeting employees’ lifestyle needs (as in the case of an employee needing to take care of an elder).

There are ~160 specialized training courses and four certifications for employees, with recruiters receiving an average of 60 hours’ training annually.

Employee benefits include a low-cost family medical plan, 100% salary for 3 months’ maternity leave, and unlimited PTO at a certain level, where vacation does not need to be approved and tracked.

The working environment is geared towards optimizing productivity and collaboration. Features include:

• Account teams sit together in pods, and phone systems are linked so that managers can listen in on candidate calls for training, coaching, and learning from each other, with the effect of increasing time to competency
• Each account team holds a morning “daily spotlight” review, looking at metrics, and identifying who needs help, etc. Each day, the team documents its key objectives, including hiring goals and achievement levels
• Service providers have formed various clubs, e.g. fitness, and often collaborate outside of work
• Yammer social networking is used to engage across each service center.

YTD employee attrition is just 2%. Sevenstep does not lay off employees, but scales up and down by moving employees between accounts.

2018 focus

Sevenstep RPO’s key focus areas for 2018 include:

• Geographic growth plans – e.g. Australia, where Sevenstep now has six people based on client site
• Reducing cost and increasing quality (i.e. value-add beyond simply filling the recruitment brief)
• Continuing to be technology agnostic, working with any platform (though SevenStep has its own Talent AI recruiting analytics platform)
• Recruiter training focus to include strategy, onboarding, how to treat candidates.

At the end of the event, Sevenstep also encouraged attendees to brainstorm and create a SWOT analysis of their own on the organization, from which additional opportunity areas emerged including  consulting and total talent.