Cow Pie RPO

  

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Being in Recruitment Process Outsourcing Business Development at Pinstripe, I have the opportunity to learn a lot about our competitors and I have developed a basic way to categorize my opponents. My system works like this:

I designate my RPO challengers as either Recruitment Process Outsourcing service providers or peddlers of Cow Pie RPO. And just so we are all on the same page, I’m not referring to the Cow Pie that consists of rich chocolate, creamy caramel, fresh pecans and featuring real Wisconsin milk and butter. I’m talking about the manure and dung version of Cow Pie (sometimes also referred to as pasture patties or meadow muffins).

Here are the top 7 characteristics of spreaders of Cow Pie RPO:

1. They share industry standards of success (reductions in costs and increases in client satisfaction) versus their own measures.
2. Cow Pie RPO implementations usually take ½ the time of a regular RPO transition. If you leave out proper knowledge transfer, change management and stakeholder training then this approach is fully understandable.
3. Their model is more about “lifting and shifting” the current situation instead of developing a customized client solution. As one of my mentors once said “RPO providers fall into 2 categories. Some are willing to do a client’s mess for less. The rest of us want to clean up the mess and do it better.”
4. They almost exclusively focus on sourcing and screening (the front end) and lack robust services in the areas of hiring logistics, compliance and governance.
5. Their teams are predominately comprised of contract recruiters who get few, if any, benefits, and have a higher turnover rate.
6. Their pricing models don’t support reinvestment in recruiter training and on-going program upgrades and innovation.
7. They typically don’t like me or Pinstripe (or several of my other worthy competitors).

The good news about real Cow Pie is that if it is left alone it will usually dry out from exposure and then crumble into healthy fertilizer for the grass and other plants. And the same is probably true of Cow Pie RPO. Over time these programs are not sustainable. They will just shrivel up and help fertilize the next generation Recruitment Process Outsourcing program.

Post contributed by Barry Diamond. Follow me on Twitter @bddiamond