Wednesday
Jul212010

Seven Step is now IBM's official RPO partner!

It's nice to be rewarded for a job well done. Since our inception, Seven Step has had a close working relationship with IBM's human resources outsourcing (HRO) division. Today, IBM has decided to make it official.

We're pleased to announce that IBM has formally selected Seven Step as their official partner for outsourced recruitment (RPO) services.

IBM's selection was made after a months-long review process that pitted Seven Step, a relatively small, young company, against the giants of the RPO industry. In the end, Seven Step prevailed for a few simple reasons:

The marriage of Seven Step's LEAN, high-touch, relationship-based recruiting model with IBM's world class technology and human-capital consulting expertise brings a unique and powerful solution to the complex hiring challenges faced by several of America's largest corporations. Currently, Seven Step and IBM are working in partnership to deliver more than 7,000 full-time equivalent hires for a variety of Fortune 50 clients. And – excitingly – our partnership was just selected to deliver more than 2,000 FTE's for a large Detroit-based automobile company.

These are exciting times for the partnership Seven Step and IBM, and we're looking forward to satisfying many more RPO clients together in the days and years ahead!

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Friday
Dec182009

Seven Step trains IBM recruiters in Hungary

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. They covered each of the seven recruitment steps thoroughly, emphasizing LEAN recruiting techniques throughout the process. The IBM team also learned about the importance of treating recruitment as a sales challenge, first and foremost.

Having now conducted several international recruitment training programs, Seven Step has learned that our unique recruitment principles are applicable and effective in a variety of cultures. And we've seen the benefits of this in our own RPO work.

When we're working with US-based companies to fill US-based jobs, everything we do is done domestically. But several of our clients also have recruiting needs in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In those circumstances, we'll typically manage all client and hiring-manager relationship tasks here, while working with teams like the one in Budapest to execute the ground-level recruiting.

Delivering our unique training programs internationally helps ensure that when we take on global assignments, there are well-trained teams ready to deliver Seven Step's trademark productivity and performance from points all over the world.

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Tuesday
Nov172009

Recruiting is SALES

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:

  • Making clear progress toward goals with every contact
  • Helping strong candidates understand the benefits your job has to offer
  • Communicating the unique value of each candidate to hiring managers
  • Maintaining buy-in for the urgency of the RPO process

But more importantly, a sales mentality greatly improves real recruitment performance:

  • Results-driven
  • Competitive
  • Service-oriented

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.

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Sunday
Nov152009

Employment Brand Stewardship

The importance of the employment brand is often overlooked in the recruiting process. That's dangerous.

For the best candidates -- the type of job seekers who can move your business forward -- choosing which opportunities to pursue involves dynamics that are similar to those in consumer purchase decision making.

Which product (job) have I heard the best things about? Which product (job) seems to have its act together? Which product (job) resonates with me emotionally? Which one just feels right?

If the job you're looking to fill is the answer to these questions, you're going to find yourself attracting a lot of great talent.

If, on the other hand, the "word on the street" about your company-as-a-place-to-work is weak, if your hiring process seems disorganized and sloppy, or if the people representing you are less than professional, you're going to have an uphill battle. You may even leave a stain in the employment marketplace that will take a while to fix.

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 train our guys on your brand and what it stands for, and we invest them in maintaining (and building) your employment reputation. Their incentive structure is built around the maintenance of your employment brand. And the system of measurement and accountability that's built into each of our seven steps helps everybody involved to track progress day by day, every day.

It adds up to the most successful employment brand stewardship in RPO. We think it's one of the pillars of our success.

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Wednesday
Nov112009

Hiring Manager Satisfaction

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 our service every month. The good news is we regularly hit 98% - 100% over the last 12 months.

That's all well and good, but I still wonder if it's enough. Is hiring manager satisfaction really the key to a successful hiring program? On one level, I can see the argument for that being the case. On the other hand, what if the hiring manager's expectations are so low it's hard not to meet them? What if the hiring managers are OK with it taking 45 to 60 days to hire someone? Or historically are so used to that kind of delivery that it's just the norm? That might not really fly with the corporate objective to acquire better talent quicker. It's weird to be an RPO thinking about ways to increase expectations, but how else are we providers going to sustain long lasting RPO deals if RPO's in general aren't looking for ways to continue to improve performance?

I said it before and I'll say it again, "lift and shift" is dead. All of us in the RPO space are going to be held to higher SLA's in every category as we dive into this next big wave.

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Monday
Nov092009

Decreasing Time-to-Fill

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.

At Seven Step, we believe that 30 days is a perfectly reasonable objective that you should be able to meet in just about every search. The secret is being smart about two things right up front:

  • Expectations
  • Incentives

In companies that manage time-to-fill carefully, there are usually two players involved moving the hiring process forward:

  • Talent acquisition / recruiting
  • Hiring managers

To minimize time-to-fill, it's critical to set expectations and provide incentives for both groups. Talent acquisition should understand the urgency of delivering a suitable volume of pre-screened, BDI'd candidates within 15 days. And hiring managers should understand the importance of developing complete and accurate job reqs, to make sure that happens. Hiring managers should also understand the importance of urgency and efficiency in candidate interviewing, making sure not to bog the process down with could-have-been-avoided scheduling delays.

Most importantly, everyone involved should understand how shorter fill times benefit company growth and profitability.

Smart incentive structures can help make all this happen. Maybe it's a quarterly cash bonus based on % of reqs filled in 30 days?  Maybe it's another PTO day added for hitting the goal? Get creative. Get everybody on the same team. Understanding, clear expectations, and the right incentives for everybody involved will help keep your fill times short, consistent, and critically, a big competitive advantage for your company.

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Sunday
Nov082009

Internal Recruiting vs. RPO

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?

On the down side, internal recruiting would know they were being tested, and would be likely to become resentful in their performance, even if the contest worked out in their favor. The contest could wreak havoc on hiring managers as well.

But on the other hand…how else are you going to get a clear picture of the recruiting performance that's truly possible, of what the maximum you can wring out of your company's resources might be? what kind of performance is possible?

When you look at it this way, can you see the huge Win/Win a contest like this might be for your company?

When your internal team outperforms the RPO, you have gained valuable confirmation that your team is performing at a high level. And when the RPO provider is the higher performer, you're now in a position to decrease headcount based on performance, and replace it with an outside provider that brings two concrete benefits:

  1. It's a proven performance upgrade
  2. The new RPO provider can be held to a much higher level of ongoing accountability than internal staff. (Few companies are willing to put their own employees' feet to the fire every single month. But as an RPO provider, we welcome the challenge.)

The bottom line is that with properly-written SLA's and proper communication to the internal team the company wins no matter what.

(So – turning things around – here's the big question... how many RPOs would be up for the challenge themselves? How many RPOs would be willing to put an entire client relationship on the line in a competition with internal recruiting?

Seven Step was. And we lost, sort of. If you'd like to hear the story, why not leave a comment, and we'll follow up this post soon?)

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Thursday
Nov052009

Seven Step Recruiting Goes International!

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.

Seven Step deployed a team of sourcing experts and recruiters to source and screen IT consultant candidates across Europe. At first, we were concerned about the language barriers, but it turned out that communication with technology candidates in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Poland was actually not too much of a hurdle. The candidates needed to be fluent in their native language and conversational in English, so other than learning local terms and cultural differences regarding phone screens, our calls were welcomed and we were able to network quite effectively.

How did we do it? It wasn't overly complicated. We set up Skype and Xing accounts for each recruiter. We used social networking tools to find potential candidates. We emailed and cold called like mad.

In one month's time we were able to source over 4000 technical candidates , including hard-to-find experts in Cisco and Microsoft technologies. We spoke to 500 of the candidates and we qualified 100+ for the client.

The client now has a database of over 3000 candidates who are available for referrals, 500 that have had at least a touch-base conversation, and 100 qualified applicants to start placing into the business.

In pursuing this project, Seven Step gained valuable experience in using US-based recruiters to network and source overseas. Maybe now we can reverse the offshoring trend and bring more jobs back to the US!

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Tuesday
Nov032009

Customer Satisfaction in RPO

At Seven Step, we're serious about satisfying our RPO customers. Our largest client keeps tabs on our service performance with a periodic internal satisfaction survey. The survey measures how well we've performed for a variety of audiences – HR, talent acquisition, hiring managers – in locations all over the country. We've been rated at over 95% satisfaction every time the survey has been taken. Our most recent satisfaction score was 98%.

The key to creating such a high level of customer satisfaction in RPO is to start thinking about it early. We start planning for a superior satisfaction performance before a client even becomes a client. At Seven Step, satisfaction starts in the RPO sales process.

A word of caution: beware the RPO sales team that promises the moon. When you start hearing promises about being able to fill any job anywhere faster, better, and cheaper, take cover. Filling jobs in the RPO model is hard. Done well, it's worth it. But done poorly, RPO can be more trouble than it's worth. Any firm that denies this essential truth in the beginning is either lacking in experience or simply unconcerned about their customers' satisfaction.

Is a high level of performance and customer service is important to your firm, you really should be on the lookout for more of a "sweet spot" than a bunch of absolutes.

The "sweet spot" you should look for is this:

  1. Is the firm confident enough to guarantee better performance than your internal team is currently able to generate? Does it have a track record to back up their claims?
  2. Is it realistic enough to admit that getting there is going to be hard work, and a collaborative effort that involves really digging into your unique needs before they ever get started?

Or to put it another way: is the firm truly a confident player in the RPO space? Confident, that is, in both its own abilities and its abilities to recognize and adapt to the always-unique circumstances at hand? If so, that's the kind of firm you can rely on the deliver the level of satisfaction you're looking for.

Now – fair warning here – satisfaction-driven firms like this (Seven Step included) will usually suggest, strongly, a dedicated upfront due diligence and analysis project. Something like this may seem like a non-critical "nice to have" in the process. But beware the firm that doesn't mention anything of the sort. When that happens, you're likely dealing with the firm that lacks the confidence to adapt to the circumstances. You're dealing with a firm that has priorities other than your satisfaction in mind.

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