Posted on Mon, Oct 31, 2011
Post contributed by Barry Diamond. Follow Barry on Twitter @bddiamond
As someone who grew up during the heyday of Friendly’s I was saddened to recently learn that the family restaurant chain was another casualty of the economy and changing customer preferences.
For those of you not familiar with Friendly’s and their signature drink, the Fribble, the best way to describe the restaurant chain is that it exists somewhere ½ way between McDonalds and Applebees. Unfortunately, as dining tastes evolved, Friendly’s ended up in restaurant no man’s land. Late attempts to catch up failed miserably and the company recently filed Chapter 11.
The question I keep pondering is: Does everything have a life cycle? Is it inescapable that at some point every concept goes out of style? And, is the best we can do is just delay inevitable? Is this the eventually fate of RPO?
I truly believe that everything does eventually come to end even Recruitment Process Outsourcing. However, there is a lot we can do to keep RPO going for the foreseeable futures (multiple decades).
Here are 5 things for RPO Service Providers to consider so we don’t end up like Friendly’s:
- Keep Innovating
- Keep Listening to Clients
- Keep Listening to the Market
- Keep Looking beyond the RPO industry
- Keep being paranoid and always be looking over your shoulder at whose coming up behind you
So we may not be able to “Fribble It” anymore, but here’s to many more years of being able to “RPO It.”
