Outsourced HR still makes sense

There are a thousand resumes on your desk. There are only two positions open. Your president wants the two positions filled in two weeks and with the right people as they are critical to operations. Your company is not at optimum productivity without them. Money is tight and you cannot afford to train people and have them leave for greener pastures or be let go for underperformance. As head of HR, how will you meet all the expectations, keep your own job, and be able to sleep at night?

HR departments need to have in-house individuals as well as relationships with outsourcing firms with knowledge of applicant tracking processes, branding, Internet recruiting, and direct or outsourced recruiting. These flexible, technical, customer-service-focused and problem-solving-oriented solutions are your secret weapons. Using all of them in tandem is a smart business move in today's economy. Why?

Efficiency - You are not the only HR departments inundated with resumes from active candidates. By having an efficient system in place to sort and organize the influx, you will be ahead of the game. An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) will help you build and expand your database, keep candidate information neatly organized and up-to-date, and give you comparative reporting capabilities.

Competitive advantage - Your company and its product or service brands may be hurtful or harmful to your recruiting efforts. A positive, strong brand image can be a competitive advantage. Candidates who collectively fit your current and future open positions have perceptions about you as an employer. Be sure you can answer questions about how you are perceived in the marketplace. Promote the positive and proactively manage the negative through strategically based tactics. Perceptions of a company's core product or service can drastically affect those of a candidate.

Expediency - Internet recruiting offers faster, simpler, more convenient and more cost-effective way to reach hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates, 24 hours a day, and seven days a week. Recruitment sites can provide statistics such as how many people looked at your job posting, how many people submitted their resumes, as well as where your job ranked with other employers recruiting for the same position. It still is working while you sleep and get ready for another recruiting day!

Strategic - HR departments traditionally operate from a process versus strategic perspective, and sometimes this negatively effects upper management's perception of the department's achievements and role. By outsourcing the recruiting function and going towards a scalable HR model, you may gain favorable attention from your president and chief financial officer for your enterprise-wide perspective. A recruiter can reduce your cost per hire. The economy will cycle back, so developing a relationship with a recruiting service now has strategic advantages far beyond your current needs. Once a recruiter knows your company, culture and business objectives, they can also be there to help when the economy turns around. When you are ready to increase your workforce, you can assign your recruiter to the task so that your company is ready to "explode out of the box" when your market demand increases. This will free you up for orientations, training and other new hire functions, as the recruiter will have found the right person who can hit the ground running with minimal investment on your part.

As a manager, we have hired many employees successfully through many of the recruiting methods reviewed above. At that time, we were not experiencing the level of desperation that exists in today's business climate. There are people currently unemployed who would have been considered "fantastic" hires and would have been offered multiple opportunities just a few years or even months ago. Those people are available and ready to work hard for the right employer. Such a short time ago they would have been considered the cream of the crop and now through no fault of their own are on the sidelines watching instead of contributing. In reality they are still the cream of the crop and you need that type of person working for you. There are solutions to hiring that type of person and solutions you can afford.

Many times it seems that spending money on a task that appears achievable with the resources at hand would be a wasteful proposition for companies that are so focused on the bottom line and how to protect it. What does not appear so readily, however, are the hidden costs of making poor hiring decisions and the impacts those decisions have for a company beyond the bottom line. For many businesses, particularly those in the service industry, such as restaurants or manufacturing companies that are labor intensive, the cost of payroll is the single largest line item on the profit and loss statement. With margins as thin as they are, hiring a bad fit employee is not a mistake you can afford to make.

Gary MacDonald is recruiting division manager for Applied Recruiting Solutions LLC (a division of The Applied Companies). Contact him at 853-5433 or Gary.MacDonald@AppliedStaffing.com. Laura Furumoto is marketing consultant for the The Applied Companies. Contact her at 830-3993 or lfurumoto1@aol.com.