Seven Step will meet your toughest hiring challenges. Our unique RPO approach delivers hiring volume efficiently, with faster cycle times and lower hiring costs. More in Seven Step Highlights.
Seven Step is a recruitment process outsourcing company. We help clients make hundreds of hires every month, filling a variety of positions across a number of industries. We're IBM's preferred domestic RPO partner.
About Us Two members of our leadership team, Beth Gilfeather and Paul Harty, just spent a week in Hungary providing recruitment training to a team of offshore recruiters from IBM.
We have a long-standing and successful partnership with IBM's business process outsourcing (BPO) group. Being asked to provide recruitment training in their Budapest Center of Excellence represents another strong step forward in our relationship.
Paul and Beth with IBM recruitment trainees in Budapest
Over the course of a week, Beth and Paul introduced the IBM team to the recruitment principles that make Seven Step's RPO approach so effective.
Hungary, IBM, offshore, outsourcing, recruitment training LEAN management has been defined as "a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination."[*]
Unlike other RPO companies, Seven Step has made the LEAN philosophy a defining feature of our approach. Everything we do is designed to implement an effective, efficient hiring process as directly as possible, with a minimum of costly waste.
We're dead-serious about keeping it LEAN.
Approach Are your recruiters strong salespeople? If they're effective recruiters, they probably are. Effective recruitment means effective selling. Simply keeping the process moving involves sales:
But more importantly, a sales mentality greatly improves real recruitment performance:
At Seven Step, one of the most important things we've taken from our agency background is a firm belief that sales skills are the foundation of effective recruitment.
All of our recruiters join us at the entry level. We look for college graduates with great attitudes, strong professionalism, high energy levels, and a burning commitment to success.Then, we train them to be effective salespeople first, and recruiters second. We believe strongly that that's why we can keep our projects moving forward so effectively, and why we consistently achieve such a high rate of recruitment performance.
Approach sales approach, stride & associates Most recruiting companies operate as loose collections of stand-alone recruiters. There's not a lot of collective effort applied to a client's needs... just a bunch of personal habits thrown at the problem.
Of course, some individual recruiters are great. But no matter good the individual may be, there's a lot of efficiency and manageability that can be lost when collaboration and cooperation are left out of the mix.
Seven Step is different. Here, every recruiter works as part of a collectively-engaged team.
RPO, recruiting, team-based, teams 
A well-defined process is critical for real recruitment productivity.
A true process, with clearly-defined progression from inception to success, is key to Seven Step's ability deliver remarkably efficient and productive RPO services.
We believe that every recruitment process proceeds through seven distinct steps, each with its own set of inputs and outputs.
About Us, Approach, RPO Process LEAN recruiting, seven step process Seven Step's unique approach to recruitment process outsourcing – an approach we call Recruitment Process Optimization – is the key to meeting your most pressing recruitment challenges.
Whether you're facing volume demands, the unforeseen crush of special events, or another unique challenge, Seven Step has a solutions-based approach for you:
Companies with a reputation as a great place to work usually see a smoother, quicker, cheaper recruitment process as their reward.
Why, then, is the importance of the employment brand so often overlooked in the recruitment process? Why are so many companies willing to miss out on the benefits of a strong employment brand? Worse, why are they willing to actually do damage to their brand with the recruitment processes they put together?
The answer is simple. It's easy to do harm, if you're not careful.
Seven Step RPO takes your employment brand seriously. That's part of why we dedicate full recruitment teams to every project, and why we're staffed with nothing but US-based professionals.
We recently took on a high-volume assignment for a company that operates11 different customer service centers around the country, each of which employs hundreds of customer service representatives.
In this particular company, volume challenges were being created by the high turnover rate that's endemic to the CSR position. These were compounded by a couple of issues specific to our client's business. For one, the company wanted to hire new CSRs in “classes,” in which 15 or more new CSRs all started work on the same day. Further, these class start dates varied by call center, all over the country.
high volume hiring 
Seven Step Recruiting is a proud member of the Stride & Associates family of professional recruiting companies.
RPO, recruiting, stride & associates Since 2007, Seven Step has worked on RPO projects in a wide range industries, targeting a number of different position types.
Here's a list of every industry and every position type we've worked:
RPO, industries, positions, recruiting Our client, the nationwide catastrophe team in a Fortune 100 insurance company, needed to hire 200 claims adjusters in the last few months before Hurricane Season 2008, but management did not see this as a feasible goal. The challenge associated with this type of hiring is finding the type of dedicated employees who can spend weeks and maybe even months away from their families at a catastrophe site. To find those types of candidates, the client expressed a desire to have a three-round interview process that needed to be coordinated and executed on a nationwide scale.
flexibility One of our largest clients (50K U.S. employees) sends out a satisfaction survey at the end of every month. Our SLA is to maintain a 90% satisfaction rating. For all you math wizards that's 9 out 10 hiring managers need to be satisfied or more than satisfied with out service every month. The good news is we regularly hit 98% - 100% over the last 12 months.
With almost 100 years of combined recruiting experience, Seven Step's team of founders and executives is ready to help you meet your most daunting recruitment challenges.
About Us RPO, leadership, recruiting We all know that time-to-fill is one of the most important metrics in the talent acquisition game. Many companies set a 30-day goal for filling key positions, from search inception to start date. Other companies see 30 days as a really short, aspirational timeframe, one that can be achieved if everything goes very well, but one that seems a little unrealistic given the many things that can potentially go wrong.
RPO, efficiency, hiring managers, metrics, outsourcing, recruiting, time-to-fill Would you be willing to put internal recruiting head to head against an RPO provider in a winner-take- all contest? The higher-performing team takes over recruiting. Either the internal recruiting team gets laid off or the RPO provider gets fired. It’s risky, but could it work?
Approach RPO, internal recruiting, outsourcing, recruiting, winner-take-all Our client, a Fortune 100 insurance company, was having difficulty building an actuarial staff of sufficient size and skill level.
Traditionally, the company had relied on an organic approach to actuarial staffing. They hired entry- or junior-level actuaries, and grew their staff from within. But as the company grew, and as industry demands became more complex, it became clear that their internal pipeline was no longer sufficient for their needs.
RPO, cost efficiency, recruiting It’s become conventional wisdom that the best people for a job are the people who aren’t actually looking for a job, because hey! how strong can a candidate be if he’s actually out there pounding the pavement for work? Right? Problem is, these people are tough to move, desirable though they may be. Essentially, there are only two options for breaking a candidate’s job-search passivity:
Seven Step recently delivered an international recruiting program for a high-profile U.S.-based technology company that is expanding their consulting services to Europe. The client needed to recruit over 100 consultants in several countries but hadn’t set up an operation in Europe yet. Due to the delivery timeline with their clients they had to prove capability to recruit in these areas quickly.
In January, 2008, Seven Step was assigned end-to-end responsibility for all outsourced recruiting efforts of a Fortune 100 insurance companyheadquartered in Chicago. The company's prior recruitment roster included overseas recruiting services and internal HR, which was distributed all over the country.
Before we were brought on board, the company's recruitment efforts were becoming very bogged down, and goals were consistently being missed. Fewer jobs were being filled, and a backlog of open positions began to pile up. Hiring managers were frustrated at the length of the overall hiring process and the lack of urgency to start recruiting for newly posted positions.
RPO, recruiting, recruitment speed