Faced with more than 23,000 redundancies globally, including a “likely” 17,000 in the UK, RBS’s group resourcing director, Susan Bor, said that she had to review both what support the affected staff would need and at the same time, the effect of the employee cuts on the bank’s internal recruiters.

In particular, Bor told Recruiter, she was looking at the impact upon the team focusing on volume clerical recruitment, as much of their work had evaporated.

“Recruitment had gone through the floor. What options would I have?” she said. “I wondered if I could bring the [outplacement] service in-house.”

Bor received permission from HR director Neil Roden to launch a pilot programme in which the in-house recruiters would provide outplacement assistance for clerical and appointed-level [including branch managers, junior management and team leaders] staff. The volume recruitment team would do the work “as they had the capacity”, Bor said.

A core team of 10 has handled the outplacement assignment, with additional flexible assistance available from other RBS recruitment consultants.

Of the target group of redundancies, 93% took advantage of the RBS in-house-provided outplacement services as opposed to around 70% that did the last time such services had been offered to significant numbers of staff (by third-party suppliers then), Bor said.

Redundant staff have been helped to either redeploy within RBS or to prepare themselves for new jobs outside the bank. The outplacement support lasts for up to three months before leaving RBS and one month after. Feedback from participants was that they would have liked more information about how to start their own businesses. Bor said: “As best we can, we’re tailoring [services] on the individual. We probably feel we’ll be delivering this service for the rest of this year, this time for business change to work through the business,” Bor added.

RBS saved £6.9m in severance costs by redeploying redundant staff to different jobs within the business, avoiding more than £800k to date in third-party outplacement supplier costs.