Why RPO fails all sides when it comes to interims, argues Ben Davies for Executive Grapevine magazine
28th May 2011
The benefits attributed to Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) make for a compelling proposition to large employers. Suppliers talk about ‘working in partnership with the client’ and ‘taking accountability for the end-to-end recruitment process’ with the aim of ‘increasing quality, providing a better service to the business and reducing costs and risks’.
Faced with such claims and set against an economic backdrop of price-transparency, value for money and cost reduction, small wonder companies have been signing up in droves.
But the benefits RPO makes possible in high volume, low level, transactional recruitment are much less clear cut when it comes to the specific circumstances that characterise senior level interim management recruitment. I’ve seen first hand what happens when an organisation introduces a fourth party to the traditional triangular relationship between client, interim service provider and the interim manager. Most of the promised benefits disappear, and here’s why.
When an organisation needs senior level interim support, more often than not it’s because something unforeseen has arisen: a key person has suddenly left the business (e.g. through illness or dismissal); an operational crisis has flared up; an individual or operational unit needs additional, heavy-hitting resource for a few months (such as in mergers and acquisitions). Speed is paramount in these circumstances and a client will naturally turn first to those they trust in their own network.
If that fails they turn to a specialist agency like mine that has invested time in the relationship to understand at a detailed level the client company’s specific needs, culture and current business issues. By doing this, the agency has all the ingredients it needs to make an incisive, informed recommendation about which interim manager would deliver the highest chance of a successful assignment.
In my experience, RPO service providers create an extra layer of bureaucracy to negotiate and use a business model that is the diametric opposite to this kind of personalised, ‘boutique’ service. If that wasn’t enough, RPO vendors I’ve encountered appear to have a higher than average turnover of staff, preventing any form of enduring relationships being built from which lasting value could be created for the client.
And what about the interim managers themselves? These people are not ordinary job seekers but hugely experienced people who have chosen an interim career as opposed to permanent employment. The best people are always in demand and need to be treated differently to the general management recruitment market where supply often outstrips demand. I’ve heard first hand on numerous occasions of good interim managers who receive scant, poor quality feedback after we’ve put them forward for roles via an RPO provider. Sometimes they don’t receive anything, despite our best efforts. All this does is give them a negative impression of the hiring company and makes them less inclined to consider future positions seriously.
Fortunately, common sense does prevail. Some companies I know have investigated and rejected the use of RPO for all but bog-standard, maternity cover-type interim assignments. Others have gone down the RPO route but have still retained a direct relationship with firms like ours. They are permitted by their companies to use us if the RPO vendor cannot supply the right quality interim within a certain time period. This is an improvement, but it then means we have to pull out all the stops to secure the right person at very short notice. And when you’re a client in that situation, the issue of best-value is not generally uppermost in your mind.
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