Two major employers sounded a blow against at outsourced recruitment on Tuesday at the annual Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development conference.

Keith Dugdale, director of global recruitment at KPMG, and Donna Miller, European HR director for Enterprise Rent-A-Car, voiced their hesitation to outsource much of their recruitment in responding to an audience question at the end of a seminar entitled "A Process and a Strategy for C21 Recruitment".

"We have used outsourcing to help us with peak activities, when we have had to recruit a lot of people very quickly," Dugdale told the audience."

However, he added, "recruitment is absolutely core to the business, and we would be cautious about outsourcing something that is core to our business". 

Miller said that Enterprise, which has 340 branches in the UK and Ireland, has also used the services of an outside recruitment "partner". However, the car hire firm has a significant in-house recruitment team, "and no one does it better" than the team members, Miller said. The in-house recruiters will have begun their Enterprise careers through the car hire company's management trainee programme, giving them a well-rounded understanding of what it is like to work there.

More than 1,600 HR practitioners are attending the annual CIPD conference in Harrogate this week.