Project-Based RPO

Sometimes the pace of business creates a recruitment need that exceeds the scope of your existing strategy, workforce, or budget. Whether the need is related to new funding or to an IPO, to a merger or an acquisition, or simply to seasonal circumstances, Seven Step can provide an effective and compliant recruitment process, quickly.

Client Situation

College Pro Painters is part of a family of franchising companies focused on home improvement-related businesses. College Pro Painters is the "entry-level" company in the family of businesses. The company works with college students to develop full-service house painting businesses in hometowns all over the country. In the company's business model, sophomores and juniors in college are recruited to become College Pro franchise owners, running their own house painting businesses during their summer vacations.

College Pro Painters came to Seven Step for help with a tough recruiting challenge. The company – which in turn is the de facto feeder system for the entire family of franchise businesses – is 100% dependent on its ability to effectively turn over the majority of its franchise owners every year.

Recruitment Challenge

Business seasonality and the uniqueness of College Pro's requirements worked together to create a challenging recruitment event:

• Tight seasonality: the entire year's recruitment had to be completed in the October-to-February window
• Reverse sell: the need wasn't to fill jobs; it was to sell skin-in-the-game franchise agreements
• Challenging target: needed to find energetic, business-minded students with the ability to work hard to build a business, and whose financial means and risk profile would allow them even passing interest in a franchise agreement more than a job
• Limited target access: college sophomores and juniors don't have resumes posted online, and they have little-to-no connection with traditional job-search channels

Seven Step Response

Seven Step was hired to address the sourcing challenges in the mix. Typical sourcing channels had already proven themselves to be of limited usefulness with the College Pro's target candidate. Instead, the company had been trying to source through career fairs and on-campus recruiting. Generating either worthwhile volume or an effective recruitment ROI through those channels was proving impossible. Seven Step's response to College Pro's sourcing challenge was to look to the future and to go old school, both at the same time.

First, we applied the well-honed expertise of our dedicated online sourcing experts. Their facility with sophisticated deep-web mining and their ability to search-optimize our job postings for a college-age audience allowed us to ferret a strong slate of potential franchise owners quickly.

Second, we made a strong project commitment to recruiting's first killer app: the telephone. We believe strongly that solid recruitment depends above all else on strong salesmanship. We dedicated four of our strongest recruiter-salespersons to a special College Pro team whose job was to cold-call the candidates identified in the deep-web mining process. College Pro's dedicated team of recruiter-salespeople conducted sales calls with more than 400 potential franchise owners every day.

Results

As a results of Seven Step's effort to help College Pro deal with its challenging recruitment event, the company now has the luxury of recruiting from a large, continually replenished pool of interested and qualified potential franchise owners. Sourcing efficiencies have gone up dramatically, and hiring managers' ability to focus on their core responsibilities is much greater than before.

In the four-month 2009-2010 hiring season, Seven Step:

• Sourced more than 20,000 potentially interested and qualified student-candidates
• Conducted more than 3,000 telephone screens
• Passed more than 1,200 interested and qualified student-candidates to College Pro's internal recruitment team

Franchisee acquisition projects up more than 20% over the previous year. Client satisfaction is high. The scope of Seven Step's engagement with College Pro was increased substantially only midway through the tight recruitment season.