RPO (EPO)How to make it work for your organization

Michael MorettiSr. Staffing Analystmmoretti@hr.comHR.com

Sponsored by:

Today, we are talking about RPO or EPO. Translated, that means recruitment process

outsourcing, although in some instances people are calling it employment process

outsourcing. I would also like to welcome John Younger who is the President, CEO, and

Founder of Accolo, which opened in January 2000.

The cartoon above talks about outsourcing your job to India and the caption is “I will

double your fee if you never say that again.” It’s an interesting perspective on

outsourcing. We are going to dispel some of the myths around outsourcing. A lot of

people think that this cartoonist basically captured that. Outsourcing your job to India,

it’s really not about that. I mean obviously there are issues around outsourcing.

Departments and places like India have become popular in the news lately, but we are

going to show a different side of outsourcing today.

Outsourcing versus off-shoring is confusing to a lot of people. We will look at the

outsourcing definition as well as something else called out-tasking, which is probably a

little bit more of an appropriate definition, and compare that to off-shoring. Certainly, it’s

a different world.

Did you know that the average number of full-time unique jobs that a recruiter can

support today - and do a good job of it - is between four and 18? Some recruiters have

many more than 18 but you start to fall off pretty quickly in terms of contracting, getting

back to everybody, and pre-interviewing everyone.

Incidentally, that was the same number of unique full-time jobs recruiters from the early

60s could support. So, the actual productivity using the Internet, email, and all these

software products, etc., hasn’t materially changed or impacted the effectiveness per

recruiter.

If you get 25 to 30, pretty soon you will get a critical mass of people applying and you

can’t get through them all or spend the time you need as hiring manager, etc.

The flowchart above gives us a sense to the potential complexities involved in a staffing

process. Most of us think very much in a linear fashion when it comes to processing our

requirements and filling jobs. In this case, I want to give everybody a decent visual here

as to the entire scope of the process from beginning to end and just how intricate it can

be. In most instances it is tough to be an expert in every area and accomplish the task

on a continual basis and do it efficiently. This gives us some idea and the scope of the

actual staffing process and is typical for most corporate environments. It runs through

the entire gamut from actually creating the requisition, creating the position all the way

through to the end when the offer is accepted and then the orientation and on boarding

process as well.

It’s not necessary to get into each part of the components of the staffing process. The

idea here is to give everybody a visual list to the overall process that you actually go

through.

To complement that, here are some statistics that we found out over the last little while.

There are a lot of different studies. This is one I think that was done by Aberdeen about

six months ago. It talks about Top Challenges designated by HR Executives and if we

look at these, read into these and do a little bit of an analytical view of this, we look at

the ability to compete for top talent, addressing benefit costs, balancing service level and

cost, benefits services, and so on down the line. We see that this all evolves around the

ability to compete for top talent and the staffing process itself right down to the bottom

where we go to maintaining the human capital management operating budget. All of

these are the top challenges that have been designated by HR executives over the last

year or so and certainly this is consistent with most surveys that we have seen.

I think that the number is going to go up and probably go up significantly over the next

five to seven years. We are already seeing signs of the market getting more competitive

in certain areas

Main Entry: out·sourc·ing Pronunciation: -"sOr-si[ng] Function: noun: the practice of subcontracting (manufacturing)work to outside and especially foreign or nonunion companies.

The definition…or is it?

There really are a lot of myths around outsourcing but the standard definition is that it’s

the practice of subcontracting (manufacturing work) because that was the original intent

of the word itself - to outsource, especially foreign or non-union companies. Outsourcing

has certainly come a long way since we originally came up with the actual term itself.

The actual meaning of Outsourcing

A related term is out-tasking: turning over a narrowly-defined segment of business to another business, typically on an annual contract, or sometimes a shorter one. This usually involves continued direct or indirect management and decision-making by the client of the out-tasking business.

Next we visit the actual meaning of outsourcing: it’s a term related to out-tasking and

that’s turning over a narrowly defined segment of business to another business. In other

words, your staffing process is part of your overall HR responsibilities. Typically, on an

annual contract or sometimes a shorter term, in many instances we hear how people

discovering RPO are going to short-term contracts to allow the vendor to prove

themselves. A number of companies that I have talked to who have gone to RPO in the

last little while have done just that, as opposed to going straight to a one-year, five-year

or 10-year contract. We hear some of the larger outsourcing deals that are done for

overall HR but really people are using trial periods with vendors to see just how they

perform on a specific position or two and that usually gets the ball rolling. Either they

perform or they don’t and they get the opportunity to do more work for the client. And it

usually involves continued direct or indirect management and decision making by the

client of the out-tasking business. So again, it is a continual process where even after

an agreement is reached, the client has a certain level of control over the results that

they get from a vendor. That means everything from the actual development of the

requisitions themselves to the filling of the positions.

A lot of the companies that we talk to and have seen think of outsourcing or RPO as a

very long continuum, from outsourcing candid identification as RPO on one side or

maybe just some screening niche or some piece of the process and on the other side of

the equation. In organizations like Accolo they are held accountable to the overall output

and you don’t need an applicant tracking system, you don’t need staff. You don’t need

job work descriptions, you don’t need research, you don’t need agencies, you don’t need

any of those things and that continuum I think in some ways confuses the market

because some people are wanting only one slice and they get the whole thing, and other

people want the whole thing but only get slices. So it is interesting to see the evolution of

this whole RPO industry.

Dilbert had a series of these cartoons a little while ago. It’s talking about recommending

outsourcing the CEO’s job and saving the company $26 million per year. For $4 a year

you can hire an Elbonian CEO. “Now you understand why we should have renewed the

consulting contract.” This is just a commentary on the fact that perhaps some of the

reasons made where outsourcing is used as an option; the decision is made for reasons

other than the appropriate ones.

People have these challenges. I am reminded of some of the Jeffrey Moore points of

core and context in that it feeds into what RPO is and is not. Most organizations I think

routinely either confuse or don’t fully understand what core is. Of course, it’s hiring the

right person. What’s context is the process by which you do that and companies

continue from our experience to focus on contextual things and try to dictate contextual

things. That’s like calling GM and saying, “I want you to build my frame on my car

differently than you build all the others,” when at the end of the day what you care about

is a high quality automobile.

That speaks sometimes to skill resources; sometimes it’s a matter of billing the

appropriate process, putting it in place and using the tools that you do have and

effectively using them so that you can have an effective process that produces a quality

hire.

“I can’t find the right people and skilled resources, we just don’t have the right team in

place.” Those are two of the main reasons why typically the staffing process does get

outsourced. Vendors are built around the idea of having a strong process, the right

people, and the ability to effectively source based on a proven methodology and I think

that is something that we see time and time again.

When I put in the context of universal recruiting best practices, whether you do it yourself

or whether you outsource it is irrelevant. Sourcing the problem or understanding the

need to the problem is key because often times what we find is that when we actually

get the hiring manager - and we get 15 and 20 minutes of time to really extract what

needs to get done by when – specifically, how you are going to measure this person’s

success, to know you have a top performer and why the right person would want this

job, we get information about the job that is very different than the template job

description that the hiring manager forwarded. I wonder sometimes in our experiences

with most of the sourcing problems, but not all of them, that they are more based in

understanding the need rather than finding the person.

Time and time again, when you actually dig down deep and ask people what the source

of the issue is, a lot of the times they can’t get the time from the hiring manager. It is

worth the investment and it’s a matter of being able to communicate it to the hiring

manager so that they do allow you time that is necessary to really get a grasp of what it

is that is going to make them click. If you are willing, from an enterprise-wide standpoint,

make sure that there is a consistency across the board, so that in fact the type of people

that you are recruiting in one location doesn’t differ greatly from another one except for

the differences in the actual approach of the hiring manager. Sometimes I think people

really don’t place enough value on that time upfront and the investment is certainly worth

the effort.

It seems like again, in the context of universal recruiting best practices, it is our belief

that every job is as unique as the company, hiring manager, project, team, and

geography to whom that job reports, and that now speaks to mass customization versus

using templates which raises the bar for most organizations they can’t meet.

10 Questions to ask

Does the outsourcing opportunity match the organization’s business needs?

Will outsourcing improve performance?

How can an organization that turns to outsourcing develop excellent human resources generalists, specialists and experts in managing vendor relationships?

There are about 10 questions that you should ask that will allow you to make an effective

decision when you are considering RPO vendors. If you can use this as part of your

assessment process when you are assessing vendors, it will bring you a long way

towards being able to effectively partner with the right company. Things like:

Did they match the organization’s business needs?

How about outsourcing, will it improve performance? Sometimes the only way that you

can gauge that is to go through some tests with vendors and see if in fact they are going

to produce the kind of quality that you are looking for.

How can an organization that turns to outsourcing develop excellent human resources

generalists, specialists, and experts in managing vendor relationships?

All questions are important to ask simply because it is choosing a partner that is going to

be very much responsible for the results that your staffing department ends up relying on

to grow an organization.

10 Questions to ask

How can an organization understand and control costs?

How can outsourcing affect the organization in an acquisition, merger or sale of a peripheral business?

Are the financial projections accurate?

Are adequate protections in place for when business conditions change?

How can you understand and control costs?

And various things like if you are going to get involved in an acquisition merger or sale of

a peripheral business, how does that affect the outsourcing issues?

What about financial projections, are they accurate?

How about adequate protections in place for when business conditions change?

All these things are things that you should be considering when you are talking to RPO

vendors because again, depending on the level of relationship you develop, they could

be in fact taking over the entire end-to-end staffing process.

10 Questions to ask

What are the cultural ramifications of BPO?

Who will manage the financial and performance aspects of the project?

Is there an escape strategy?

Is this the smart choice for YOUR company?

What are the cultural ramifications of business process outsourcing as opposed to RPO

or EPO? It’s an acronym for the same thing. Are you going to be actually outsourcing

any part of your staffing process and how is that going to affect the culture within?

Who is going to manage the financial and performance aspects of the project? Do you

have a project manager internally or is that something that your vendor provides to you?

Is there an escape strategy? Always good to know that if you do lock yourself up with a

vendor and you are getting the results that you are looking for, how can you get out of

that relationship and move on to somebody who is going to provide you with better

service? And finally, is this the smart choice for your company?

I think one of the issues that we hear time and time again at HR.com, when we are

talking to people about RPO, is that they look for references and by all means, when you

are doing your due diligence, use references but remember that every company is

different and what works for your competitor, what works for the company across the

street, what works for your colleagues, your associates and so on, might not necessarily

work for you. It is a good way to gauge whether or not the company has got great

customer service, how productive they are and so on, but they still may not necessarily

be the right fit for your organization because it is an individual culture. It is important to

customize or pay special attention to detail for each position that you are recruiting for

and use the same mentality when you are using an RPO. Just because it works for 10

other companies doesn’t necessarily mean it is going to work for you. Make sure that,

based on your culture and your needs and your requirements and the business terms

and so on, that the smart choice for your company is the same company. Really that

means doing a lot of due diligence and making sure it’s a good fit and you are not just

plugging yourself into a templated process that happens to work for everybody else.

If there is one key thing that I would say is common across the more successful

relationships, that’s executive sponsorship. I have seen organizations that don’t have

executive sponsorship and it’s almost always something that appears a little later in the

process when executive decisions need to be made. They are usually not made in the

best interest of the partnership because the senior executive has not bought in to the

concept.

Getting that buy in from the start and really developing a partner at the C-level is always

the first step in making a business case for any change that you are going to make to

any process, whether it be buying software, partnering with a service company or

something else.

RPO ModelsFull Service

We are looking at different models now, and at this map of RPO models at full service.

Full service basically means that it encapsulates every possible function within the

staffing process from the time a requisition actually gets created to the time that

somebody is on board and working with the organization. There are companies that

provide full level service and will take over the entire staffing process for you.

There is a dynamic with an RPO relationship that sometimes addresses some of the

hiring manager engagement issues. That is very much like when Accenture or other

companies engage in a consulting level independent of HR or not. But when you have

an external consulting organization delivering you can sometimes get a different level of

buy in because they don’t necessarily get woven into some of the hierarchy and political

structure that exists. Many times a consulting relationship allows the consulting

organization and the people within it to traverse the organization with a little bit more

ease. Often times that translates into more hiring manager buy in.

If it’s an outside consulting company then they must know what they are doing, in which

case we will buy in. They are not so hesitant to buy in and that is part of the reputation

that HR brings with them sometimes. If there is an outside consulting company involved,

it’s a little easier for HR or hiring managers to buy the idea.

HR is generally thought of as being processes oriented whereas the consulting

organization is more results oriented at least in perception, if not always in actuality.

Component – Custom service

When we look at other options for the models, I tried to make this as simple as possible.

In breaking it down to a component level, there are various parts in the beginning,

middle, and end that you can actually outsource to companies that take on those

responsibilities. So in some instances, they work very much on the creative side or the

advertising or marketing side, where they will develop job descriptions for you, they will

use the appropriate sources to post the positions and once they have the actual

responses then it gets pushed back into your staffing process. So it’s an outside arm,

much like an advertising agency. There are quite a few of them that will do that work for

you and once they actually have developed the sources, then all of the feedback, all of

the responses to the postings the process actually comes back to you. Then, there are

others that get involved in the middle of the process. You go out and do your own

sourcing but when it comes time to actually doing the logistics of setting up meetings

and getting hiring managers involved and moving people through the process, they can

provide some level of service when it comes to making sure that that happens. Perhaps

it’s the middle to the end of the process where you are looking at things like background

checks, various screening processes that you may put people through like blood tests,

and then there is the actual orientation or on boarding process or perhaps it’s the actual

offer presentation process. Farmers don’t necessarily have the people who can close

deals and sometimes it’s a matter of moving people through a process to a point where

they are ready to either accept or not. A company can come in via a consultant at the

offer stage to suggest an appropriate level of compensation, being able to present an

actual offer package to candidates to have them effectively accept every offer that is

presented to them. So there are areas of specialization within the entire overall process

that can actually be outsourced on a custom level.

Again, it all depends on what your needs are and finding the right vendor who provides

the right mix of services to round out your staffing process to allow you to be free to

concentrate on strategy. There are companies out there that will provide you with a

strategy to this staffing process and do just that for you. So you may have the internal

machinations of a good staffing department that can do all the logistics, the

administration, but really it’s the strategy that you need some help with. There are

companies that can provide you that level of service.

OptionsRecruitment Strategy Job Analysis

Selection Process Design

Selection Process Validation,

Candidate Generation,

Applicant Processing/Selection Search,

Recruitment Management System (RMS),

Recruitment Administration

Background/Drug Screening

EEOC/DOL/OFCCP Compliance and Reporting,

Screening, Assessment Testing

Behavioral Interviews

Scheduling and Interview Administration

Background Investigation and Compliance Management

Offer and On-boarding Management and Orientation Training

24/7 Report and Analysis Platform

Process and Performance Management

Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

Technology Integration Policy

Total Workforce Acquisition

Account Governance.

WOTC Tax Credit Reporting

Contingent/Temporary Labor Consulting

Metrics/Analysis. Hiring Process

Re-Engineering

Staffing

Solution Consulting Methodology Business Case Development

Due Diligence and Implementation

Sourcing and Pre-recruitment Pipeline Services TechnologyRecruitment Marketing/Branding

The above gives you a sense as to what the potential is if you decide to outsource a

component of your staffing process. Everything from a recruitment strategy, job

analysis, to due diligence, implementation of technology, the actual hiring process,

reengineering of the hiring process, you can go to things like total workforce acquisition.

OptionsEnd to End Hiring Programs--appointment of a dedicated program team

Design and install a customized candidate sourcing strategy

Hiring process re-engineering

Recruitment technology assessment and recommendations

Integrated applicant tracking and requisition approval processes

Management of all candidate and hiring community communications

Candidate offer management

Conduct all post-offer screening activity

Establishment and management of hiring program partners and complete ongoing management of client hiring program.

Customized Mission Critical Hiring Projects--augmenting the clients internal recruitment function; outsourcing of hiring for specific skill sets or geographic regions for clients (usually for a specified time period involving volume hiring conditions)

Consulting and program management services

Technology consulting

Workforce planning consulting

Assessment consulting

In some instances again it’s the entire end-to-end process. Sometimes it’s just the

EEOC or OFCCP compliance and reporting step of the process or something behavioral.

Without going through each one of these individually, I just want to give you a sense that

there are companies out there who will package various options like this in a unique and

custom package for you so that you are not actually outsourcing the entire recruiting or

staffing process.

Another point of reference is the RPO Association, www.rpoassociation.org, where there

is some information that you might find valuable. There is a relationship diagram of most

of these things and you can initiate RFIs to drill down in any given bucket that you wish

to drill down on. In other words, if you are looking for an organization that does

background drug screening, you will be able to initiate an RFI for the members of the

RPO Association who do that and it might be people who only do that.

This is a vendor neutral organization whose primary mission is to educate the market

and help solve some of the overall problems with recruiting, not just related to RPO, and

part of that education is giving access and so it’s an easy way to initiate contact with

vendors and the various buckets.

It is important to understand that there are vendors out there that have menus that are

as comprehensive as the options that we are showing you on the screen and ideally, it is

a good idea to have all the information in one bucket, one silo of information, so that you

are not constantly cross referencing information from one vendor or another. The same

is true regarding going to an applicant tracking vendor. Whether it’s applicant tracking or

RPO or any other service that you bring in to HR, generally speaking it’s ideal to work

with one vendor and not do a piecemeal project. Although in some instances, it makes

good business sense to consider other options other than all of those options provided

by one vendor.

The research done around the recruiting efficiency for the recruiters has not budged in

the last 40 years in terms of overall productivity. That is unfortunately why HR is largely

considered a cost centre as opposed to some division of an organization that can

actually add strategic value. IDC has forecast staffing and recruiting services spending

$92 billion worldwide by 2009 and that is growing at a rate of about 8.3%. It is fueled by

the emerging trend towards recruitment process outsourcing. RPO is gaining strength

as companies seek more cost effective ways to reach the best candidates quicker than

the competition. So when we talk about growth of RPO, it is just now really starting to

catch on and people are starting to understand the true value that can be achieved

through dealing with an RPO vendor. That statistic certainly highlights the fact that we

are going to see incredible growth over the next five or 10 years in RPO.

The key here is whether this is a trend or just a fad. Fads have come and gone around

what was going to fundamentally change the universe of recruiting. Career Central,

Guru.com and so many other vendors have been at the forefront. Even Hire.com to a

certain degree are doing that or they delivered on that and they become in some ways

more of a fad type of thing than a true change and so the question with RPO is – is this a

fad or is this here to stay?

I think with the advancement of the technology in selling and the whole idea behind

staffing being a manual process, there is some true value in a version of the RPO model.

Whether it will stay exactly as it’s defined today or not who knows, but I think in some

way, shape, or form, we are going to see more specialization in every facet of business.

I think RPO is just a good indication that the trend is certainly moving that way. I think

some version of it will be around for a long time simply because the numbers dictate that

you are not going to have the same sort of access to candidates long term. Right now

we are talking about numbers showing a deficiency of about five million people in North

America at least and those numbers are projected to be 10 million within the next 10

years. So I think we are going to see more and more specialization. Whether the RPO

model is going to stay the same, we will see.

Case StudyPublicly traded technology firm in CA.

12,000 employees

1 in house recruiter

150 new hires/ yr (approx. 15 openings/mth)

Avg. time to fill 75 days

Avg. cost per hire $16,000

Average salary range $80 K

This is a company that I have been talking to recently and we are actually going to be

doing a reality HR interview in the next couple of weeks. Just to go through this quickly,

75 days is average time to fill 150 new hires per year and about 15 per month, and the

average cost per hire was astronomical at $16,000 per at an average salary of $80,000.

This is a very specialized company with technology needs for engineers and software

people and so on.

RPO Test Model

1 in house recruiter

1 admin person

Full service model

Access to back end technology (ASP)

3 month test (approx. 30 positions to fill)

Avg. time to fill 15 days

Avg. cost per hire $3,000

When they decided to look at RPO, they decided to look at a test model; they had one in

house recruiter from the RPO vendor and one admin person. They went with the full

service model, so again from requisition development to the actual hiring and on

boarding and orientation process, and they had access to backend technology that was

provided by the RPO vendor. They did a three-month test and filled approximately 30

positions. The average time to fill came down to 15 days at an average cost per hire of

$3,000. So, average time to fill came down 60 days and average cost per hire came

down dramatically. We are talking about tens and thousands of dollars in savings over a

short period of time. The results of course speak for themselves. When they went with

this RPO test model, they immediately got the new model approved. They have a new

service level agreement in place. The hiring managers are completely bought into the

process because they were so impressed by the results the RPO vendor provided within

the first three months. They saw savings of approximately $200,000.

ResultsNew Model approved

New SLA in place

Hiring Manager buy in

Savings in 1st quarter (to date) $200,000

Better corporate methodology in place

Better metrics

C level buy in

There is a better corporate methodology in place overall. Everybody is bought into the

process and getting better metrics because they are basically keeping track of the entire

process. Obviously we have got some extreme results here for this particular company

that went with the RPO model but obviously not everyone is going to have as dramatic a

result as this immediately. However, over the long haul it has been proven time and

time again that there are potentially great savings in an RPO model. I will balance this

out with a comment on the fact that we have heard some horror stories about RPOs.

There are some vendors out there that don’t necessarily deliver on their promises. They

certainly over promise and under deliver. So, I wouldn’t want to give everybody the idea

that this is a panacea, but I think it’s clear that there are a few very successful models

out there and a few very successful vendors that can in fact provide you with dramatic

results.

1.Get executive support.

2.Set realistic expectations.

3.Include your entire recruitment need.

Top 7 Success factors

1. Get executive support. Nothing beats getting executive buy in. When you can sell a

senior level executive the idea and get their support to the process, it makes the entire

decision making process that much easier.

2. Set realistic expectations. Again, it is not a panacea for everyone and there are

going to be challenges along the way. So set realistic expectations from the get go and

you certainly have a better chance at success.

3. Include your entire recruitment need and that means going through a detailed

discussion with the potential vendor and doing a real discovery process and getting into

the details of what your staffing processes are all about, so they will have a full scope of

what to expect from the actual service that they are going to provide and what you are

going to except from them. Again, putting service level agreements in place is always a

good thing to do.

4.Establish a small number of key outcomes with metrics

that relate to hiring quality, speed and cost.

�Quality of hire

�Quality of process

�Time to present the person who is ultimately hired.

�Cost.

5.Compile a list of true recruitment outsourcers.

4. Establish a small number of key outcomes with metrics. Again, what you can’t

measure you can’t manage. It’s important to make sure that that happens and relate

them to actual hiring, quality, speed and cost as a good basis for initiation of the

process: quality of hire, quality of process, time to present the person who is ultimately

hired, and cost.

The time to present the person is a very important data point because it is the dividing

line between recruiting efficiency versus interviewing and offer hiring efficiency. The first

half is completely on the RPO vendor and the second half is often times related to how

quickly the organization interviews. That supports having a good SLA (service level

agreement) in place, so that these agreements are in place before hand, so there is no

surprise or potential hires’ resumes don’t end up sitting on a hiring manager’s desks for

a month before they are acted on.

5. Compile a list of true recruitment outsourcers, and we are certainly working on a

comprehensive list. I know that the RPO Association is working on that as well. There

are various articles out there that list some of the top vendors, so it’s becoming more

and more easier to come up with that list.

6.Communicate your points of recruiting painDescribe why you are outsourcing the recruiting function

�Outline your process

�Average cycle times

�Average cost per hire

�Recruitment infrastructure that the RPO will replace

�Number of hiring managers to be supported and their locations

�Job detail – job titles, brief description of responsibilities salary levels, exempt/non-exempt, locations, number of hires for each in the previous yearand expected number of hires in the upcoming year;

�Actual hires by source for the previous year

Communicate your points of recruiting pain; this goes back to outlining the process: an

average cycle time to average cost per hire, the infrastructure that will be replaced. The

number of hiring managers to be supporting the locations, the job detail, and the actual

hires by source for the previous year - all are important details to communicate.

I am doing a consulting project right now with a large telecommunication firm, actually a

wireless provider, and the first step of the process was to actually do direct and indirect

costs to see where they were and six months later, we are still working on it.

�Employee referral programs

�Any other existing relationships with human resources outsourcing vendors (e.g., payroll and benefits are outsourced to …)

�Existing service level agreements with hiring managers

�Hiring manager and candidate quality survey responses

�Diversity objectives

�Retention data

�Areas of hiring difficulty

�Employment branding activities and budget

�Describe the company culture

All these are important issues to discuss with the vendor, to make sure that there are no

surprises at some point in the process. Express to them where you are having difficulty

hiring people and if there are specific positions or specific locations, the company

culture, all these are important issues to deal with and discuss with the vendor.

7. Select and manage the right RPO.

And perhaps most importantly - I can’t make this point strongly enough - but select and

manage the right RPO. It goes back to making sure that the vendor is right for you.

Again, just because they get great references, just because your friends and colleagues,

people that you know are your competitors are using a certain vendor doesn’t make

them right for you. Make sure that you are managing the right RPO for your company

based on your needs.

Summary

Due your Diligence

�Internal

�External

Choose your options

Choose the right vendor

Develop SLA

Measure and Improve

In summary, do your due diligence, internal and external, and by internal I mean really

do a good job of accessing every department within the organization and the

departments that are going to be affected by this to make sure that you are in full

agreement of what expectations are from potential vendors. External diligence means

doing your diligence when it comes to the vendors and what sources they are providing

and whether or not they can provide you a full service or component service or if there

are options available to you.