Last week I attended PeopleScout’s annual client NEXT Talent Summit 2019. In the keynote address, President Taryn Owen noted that this event marked one year since its acquisition of TMP to strengthen its global RPO and talent advisory capabilities. TMP, which operated in the U.K. under the brand name TMP Worldwide, provides employer branding, recruitment marketing, and RPO services through its Yocto brand. The acquisition expanded PeopleScout’s global RPO capabilities and EMEA client base, and its London office became PeopleScout’s EMEA headquarters. TMP expanded PeopleScout’s talent advisory offering by adding services such as employer branding, recruitment marketing, assessment services and talent acquisition strategy.

PeopleScout has also been growing organically, adding over 45 RPO contracts in 2018, and now has over 215 RPO clients with over 300k annual hires. In addition, there were around two dozen contract extensions. PeopleScout continues to be the largest RPO provider in terms of revenues in North America and they have continued to grow globally, across EMEA, APAC and LATAM. Half of PeopleScout’s employees are now based outside of the U.S.

Taryn Owen stated that a major priority for PeopleScout is its Affinix technology to enable a better user experience for candidates. Affinix is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure, integrates with all ATS and VMS systems, and has a single sign-on. Its capabilities include:

• Digital and social recruiting, including the creation of job ads, job descriptions and career portals
• Artificial intelligence, including for immediate sourcing of passive and active candidates when a job requisition is opened
• ‘Mobile first’ platform for both the candidate and the hiring manager throughout the application, scheduling and screening process
• Video interviews and digital assessments to reduce time to hire using data analytics and machine learning to identify and rank the best candidates to communicate with hiring managers faster
• Predictive analytics and machine learning throughout the hiring process to better understand top talent behaviors and predict factors such as cultural fit, willingness to change companies, and future tenure potential.

One of the presentations by Andrew Wilkinson, PeopleScout’s Group Managing Director of Europe and APAC, was on creating a compelling brand experience across the employer lifecycle. Per NelsonHall’s RPO Market Analysis published last week, employer branding has elevated in importance as the global talent shortage has worsened. And in recent interviews with PeopleScout RPO clients, this was seen as an area where PeopleScout is excelling, as these two examples indicate:

• For a U.K. grocery chain, PeopleScout created a campaign featuring videos of a diverse group of people sharing stories about managers who inspired them. The video was viewed 484k times with positive feedback, resulting in exceeding the client’s goal of hiring 3k people for a new type of role
• For Virgin Media, PeopleScout focused on increasing employee referrals, updating its referrals website to elevate employer branding, and helped to communicate the Employee Value Proposition to current employees so they could identify the kind of people Virgin Media wants to hire. Within one year, referrals increased external hiring by 10% to 25%, employee participation increased to 40%, quality of hires increased, and Virgin Media saved $9k per hire on average.

Having attended these events four years in a row, I’ve observed that PeopleScout has a very strong and collaborative relationship with its clients, reinforced by achieving high customer satisfaction marks for quality of partnership in our most recent RPO NEAT vendor evaluation.