To Go or Not Go RPO Bananas
Posted on Tue, Sep 13, 2011
Post contributed by Barry Diamond. Follow Barry on Twitter @bddiamond
There are so many lessons to be learned from others on how or how not to run a successful RPO business that it sometimes becomes difficult to pick. Over the years I’ve tended to fixate on those examples which we clearly want to avoid. I believe that by understanding bad business models and then doing the opposite, we are much more likely to be successful. The current state of the banana industry provides the latest example of a dire business strategy that recruitment process outsourcing service providers can learn from and steer clear of.
Dan Koeppel, the author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, recently published a story in The Scientist magazine claiming that the type of banana that most Americans eat may be doomed and on the brink of disaster.
Why you ask? Because the banana industry is a monoculture based on cloning. This monoculture was devised to drastically drive down the cost of bananas and make them the cheapest of all the supermarket fruits. So even though there are over 1,000 banana types, the only one we eat is the Cavendish banana.
Now, the Cavendish banana is seriously threatened by something called Panama disease. And because of cloning that means that when one banana gets sick, every banana gets sick.
This monoculture is a recipe for disaster and yet the nothing is being done because the banana companies believe that they can come up with some quick fix (chemical) to fight the disease. What we are observing is human denial. Human denial is unfortunately a very common occurrence and banana companies are run by humans.
I believe there are many RPO service providers who are running their business like the banana industry with a singular, one size fits all recruitment outsourcing product offering that is very low cost but also highly susceptible to issues and problems. The banana model may work ok for awhile; however, as conditions change and the service provider remains static the ROI and success quickly fades. So while cheap in the beginning, the end result may prove to be far more costly if the RPO program is doomed to partial or complete collapse.
When I look at the business of bananas, I see how not to run a RPO business. So here’s to more variety of bananas on supermarket shelves and more customized and customer-centric Recruitment Process Outsourcing programs.
For more on RPO and Bananas, check out Jeff Jurinak’s blog on Talent Boost.
