Building a business case for bringing recruitment in-house

If your company is currently outsourcing its recruitment to an RPO, how do you build a convincing business case for having an in-house recruitment team?

That was the question posed by Sue Kingston in her seminar at this week’s In-House Recruitment Summit at Edgbaston Stadium in Birmingham. The former head of recruitment and now head of HR business partnering at St James’s Place Wealth Management shared her experience when she persuaded the board to bring recruitment in-house. 

She told the audience of in-house recruiters that market intelligence, planning and looking at the team you need were essential elements in building the case to present to your company.

One of the most important issues was to check the contract with the RPO. Were there any costs involved in bringing recruitment back in-house – for example, was there a penalty clause for cancelling before a certain period?

“Speak to your stakeholders [in the business] about the future growth plans for your firm,” she advised. From that information, look at the scalability: the good thing with RPOs is that firms can scale up or down, depending on the hiring demands, she said. Kingston admitted she was nervous at first about losing that advantage of using an RPO.

She added that she decided not to let the hiring managers know of the changes, because she didn’t want them to start getting worried about the recruitment processes.

Plan or map out the overall recruitment function of your business, she said, showing a model for the future, with scalability. And make sure the service shows excellence, especially for candidates, she impressed on the audience: “Map out the candidate journey, so that even those who aren’t successful still say, ‘wow’ [about your company].”

As for the team, “think carefully about who you bring across [from the RPO]”, she said, as they need to fit in. Kingston transitioned several members of the RPO team into the internal team, but there were issues where a certain recruiter couldn’t fit in with the non-RPO culture of the company, which caused issues.

Kingston told the audience the move to in-house was definitely financially beneficial for the company. As for the hiring managers, the feedback was they didn’t really notice a difference at all in the process.

If you work for a direct employer as part of a recruitment team, check out the in-house categories for our 2020 Recruiter Awards. Entries haven’t opened yet, so there’s time to choose your categories and think about which ones to enter!

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