My Biggest Mistake as a Hiring Manager

If you're consider recruitment process outsourcing for your organization, one of the concerns your HR leader may have is losing control of her recruiting function. “I can’t possibly give up control of recruiting!” she may say. John Younger, CEO of Accolo and co-founder of the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association (RPOA), had the exact same reaction when he was a hiring manager at a major bank. In this article, based on the RPOA webinar “Time to Consider Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)” we explain why he thinks that was his biggest mistake as a hiring manager.

Are You Really Giving Up Control by Outsourcing Recruiting?

Giving up what you see as control of a core function to an outside party can be a terrifying prospect. What if they don’t perform well? What if they don’t deliver? What if they go off the rails and I can’t do anything but watch? All of those concerns can occur to a hiring manager first confronted with the prospect of an RPO engagement. However, John Younger states that rather than seeing RPO as a loss of control, hiring managers should see it as a huge advantage.

Younger uses the example of what he terms his biggest mistake as a hiring manager to illustrate how RPO can be beneficial to hiring manager.

The Downside of Recruiting in-house

While a vice president of HR at a major bank, Younger was aware that the bank’s technology and support divisions needed extra support in recruiting. His response was to try to create an internal recruiting agency inside those divisions, rather than looking outside the bank for potential recruiting partners or other assistance. He quickly found that despite his best efforts, he couldn’t pull together enough resources to create the kind of recruiting support he envisioned, and that the necessary structures weren’t in place to support such robust internal recruiting processes.

Though his attempt to create a full in-house recruiting agency for the difficult divisions did not work, he did learn from the mistake. He found that to have the kind of division-dedicated recruiting ability that he wanted to create, you needed to be an RPO provider with an existing management hierarchy, metrics and accountability, and capabilities and resources that go far beyond what an internal function can do.

The Value of Outsourcing Your Recruiting Function

When Younger was trying to create his in-house recruiting capability, he came up against recruiters who didn’t know how to directly source talent and utilize resources to their fullest, because that wasn’t their core talent. As a hiring manager, he dealt with slow contingent recruiters and a considerable lag time in changing and updating any portion of the recruiting process or strategy. According to Younger, it would have been great to have someone else directing the recruiters, someone who could say “change this” and have it changed in an hour.

Hiring Managers Can Win by Outsourcing their Recruiting Functions

This is one of the benefits of RPO providers – they have the flexibility and processes in place that internal recruitment often does not, as well as an expertise and focus that comes from recruiting being their primary activity and core talent. 

To hear John share these mistakes and show how recruitment process outsourcing can turn your HR function into a strategic executive resource, watch the video, “Time to consider recruitment process outsourcing”.