Where Does an HR and Recruiting Team Deliver the Most Value?

Corporate recruiters and HR professionals often have too many open positions – too many requisitions – to effectively do all of the planning, sourcing, screening, selection, selling, data entry, hiring manager account management, and reporting that’s required for each of their openings. They get overloaded with emails and bombarded with unqualified resumes. So, they have to make tradeoffs, and focus on the areas where they deliver the most value to their business.

In response to this limited capacity, many corporate HR leaders are refocusing their internal recruiters on the areas where they add the most value, which include:

• Building candidate sourcing strategies
• Targeted candidate sourcing and networking
• Convincing quality candidates to consider their company and jobs
• Managing candidate relationships and creating a great candidate experience
• Consulting with hiring managers and managing those relationships
• Operationally executing the strategy and process

Why engage a resume sourcing firm?

Searching the Internet job board resume databases, like Monster.com, which has millions of resumes, and Googling for candidates across the web, is a core part of every recruiting team’s sourcing strategy. It can also be one of the most time consuming and expensive use of a professional recruiter’s time. By partnering with a resume sourcing firm to find those resumes and narrow down the hundreds of key-word-match resumes to the truly on-target resumes, an HR leader can free up their internal team to focus on the higher value-add activities.  

What does a resume sourcing firm do?

They find, screen, and qualify resumes from the web
Resume sourcing firms employ sourcing teams who leverage advanced internet recruiting techniques and access to the major job boards and niche career sites to find and screen resumes that match a job’s profile. They load the quality resumes into a secure account on their web-based tool – for their client to access and review – or load the resumes directly into a client’s applicant tracking system (ATS) via remote access. Then, a company’s internal recruiting team makes decisions about which resumes to interview, and which ones to pass on to hiring managers.

They’re often a lower cost, faster alternative
When HR leaders compare the costs of paying their professional-level recruiters and HR team members to surf the job boards – and filter through the hundreds of unqualified resumes – to the costs of hiring a resume sourcing firm, it’s often significantly less expensive to outsource this time consuming activities to a resume sourcing firm. Many firms charge a project fee that’s usually just several hundred dollars more than the retail price of a posting on a job board like Careerbuilder.com.

Additionally, many recruiters and HR professionals find it challenging to carve out several hours each day to search the Internet for on-target resumes. A resume sourcing firm, which focuses 100% on Internet sourcing, can often generate a batch of qualified resumes within 1-2 days of the order.

“We do high volume, professional level recruiting. We were spending too much time searching the job boards for active candidates, doing the low hanging-fruit work. I needed my recruiters on the phone, getting quality candidates interested in our positions, and managing the process. With 40+ requisitions per recruiter, we didn’t have time to do everything internally, and there was no way we’d want to outsource the candidate-facing and hiring-manager facing work. That’s where my team really adds value. So, we hired Velocity Resource Group to source resumes from the job boards for us. We’ve been using them for 2 years, and it’s worked extremely well. They’re an integral part of my recruiting strategy now.” Global Recruiting Manager, EATON

How companies use Velocity Resource Group today

Motorola, a Fortune 100 company that hired over 7,000 people last year
Motorola’s Director of Sourcing owns candidate generation for difficult skill sets and large-scale hiring ramp-ups. That team hired 3,000 people last year. They use Velocity Resource Group to help with requests that their team doesn’t have the capacity to support.

“When we get a request from one of our recruiters for a project that we don’t have capacity to handle, we look at the position requirements, and decide whether or not it’s something our Resume Sourcing firm can help with. What’s really nice is that we’ve integrated Velocity’s services into our ATS (Peopleclick), so that once they filter through the resumes, they can directly assign them – in our system – right to the recruiter’s open requisition. They’re like an on-demand contract recruiter that we can turn off and on as needed. It’s worked really well.”

Wolters Kluwer, an 18,000-employee company based in Amsterdam
The Director of Staffing for Wolters Kluwer hired 1,600 people last year. They use Velocity as an extension of their recruiting team. While the internal recruiting team is driving the aggressive, direct sourcing efforts from their target companies, the external Resume Sourcing firm covers the job boards.

“I want my people building an internal agency. They need to be on the phones networking, sourcing, and building quality relationships with candidates. It costs me too much to have them surfing the job boards all day. We need to spend time on the things that will differentiate us from the competition – on the things that agencies would be doing. That’s how I save money, get great hires, and get the real ROI down the road. It’s a waste of time for us to spend time on the stuff Velocity Resource Group does for us. They can do it faster and cheaper. And my team is free to do what we do best.”

Fair Isaac, a 50-year-old company based in Minneapolis
Fair Isaac will hire about 700 people in 2006. Their Vice President of Recruiting Solutions uses a Resume Sourcing firm for focused projects, when they need to quickly ramp up hires in key markets.

“We’ve moved to an event recruiting model for some key positions that pay over $80,000 per year. We had Velocity Resource Group handle the candidate generation for 4 target cities over 6 weeks. Once they generated the quality resumes, my recruiters did the higher value-add screening work, so that the candidates that our hiring managers interviewed were on-target. That was a good use of our time, and a good use of a firm like Velocity. It was a fantastic partnership, and the return on investment was excellent. We made 27 offers from this effort. ”

GlaxoSmithKline, a 100,000 employee pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline’s Manager of Sourcing Solutions leads a central sourcing team that supports full life cycle recruiting account managers. They use Velocity Resource Group as an alternative for recruiters who want to post ads on the job boards.

“Our recruiters have 40-50 requisitions each. They have little time to source candidates on the Internet or filter through and act upon all of the resumes that come in when we post a job on a major job board. In fact, we looked at our yield from job board postings, and we see quality resume matches from less than 5% of the people who apply. So, now, when they do request a job board posting, we often offer them an alternative. We suggest they use a 3-day resume sourcing project with Velocity instead. Now, instead of getting overwhelmed with a ton of unqualified candidates from a posting, they can get a quick batch of on-target resumes from the job boards in just a few days.”

OfficeMax, a leading office products retailer with over 1,000 superstores
The Staffing Director at OfficeMax found real technology and cost advantages when using Velocity for the exempt-level corporate roles and large-market sales roles OfficeMax needed to hire. “We didn’t have a recruiting database, or access to as many job boards as Velocity had, so we not only saved recruiter time by outsourcing some of the candidate sourcing to them, but we also leveraged their investments in technology, too.”

Pros and Cons of using a resume sourcing firm

Pros:

• Frees up an HR and recruiting team to focus more on higher value-add activities
• Much less expensive and faster than search firms when there is an urgent hiring need
• Faster, more on-target results, and not much more expensive than a posting on a major job board
• Can be easily turned on when demand grows, and turned off when the internal recruiting team capacity grows
• Real people review the resumes against a client’s criteria before sending a resume, so a company gets more on-target resumes than many technology solutions or advertisements on a job board
• A company gets to keep all resumes presented (not just the top 3 a “headhunting” firm may present), for use now or in the future
• A resume sourcing firm may offer services that can help a company comply with the recent U.S. government rulings that requires much more detailed tracking of internet sourcing activities and candidate pools

Cons:

• If a recruiting team already actively mines the job boards on a regular basis, a resume sourcing firm may return mostly duplicate resumes
• It’s a relatively new type of service, that may need some selling internally before it’s adopted by internal recruiters and HR professionals
• The resumes a resume sourcing firm – or anyone – finds on the web or on job boards are not always pre-screened for availability or salary requirements before being presented
• A resume sourcing firm will not be successful for every level and type of position
• Resume sourcing firms do not guarantee a hire
• All work is done over the phone, via email, or via the firm’s resume portal – they are not down the hallway

Conclusion

Leveraging Velocity Resource Group as part of your overall recruiting strategy
All kinds of companies – from larger companies with central sourcing teams, to smaller companies with limited HR and recruiting teams – are leveraging Velocity Resource Group as a strategic sourcing partner. The 5 companies highlighted in this paper have each found a way to successfully incorporate Velocity’s offerings into their strategy and process.

Some use Velocity because they’re fast and reduce time-to-fill metrics, while others use them because they’re cheaper than search firms and expensive contract recruiters. Regardless of their reason, HR and recruiting leaders are finding that, when they partner with Velocity, they free up their internal team members from the time-consuming and repetitive resume sourcing activities so that they can focus on the higher value-add work that’s needed to hit the aggressive hiring goals they face.

Velocity Resource Group provides you with an on-demand, low-cost resume sourcing engine. To learn how Velocity can help you, call 866-891-0888.

Velocity Resource Group is a resume sourcing firm which employs skilled sourcing teams to provide low cost, highly effective, on-demand Internet-based candidate sourcing and pre-screening services to companies of all sizes, from all industries.

Contact:
800 W. 5th Avenue, Suite 202 Naperville, IL 60563 USA
T: 866-891-0888
www.velocityresourcegroup.com

Acknowledgements:Thank you to the corporate HR and recruiting leaders who shared their experiences and insights, including Beth Tong-Miller, Ann Quackenbush, Judy Brooks, Brian Washington, Gina Martin, Melanie Villapando, Jim Siakel, and John Vlastelica.Copyright © 2006 by Velocity Resource Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
Cover art designed by J. Morrison Group: www.jmorrisongroup.com