ooks Are Fun, a Chicago-based subsidiary of Reader’s Digest, must recruit
250 to 300 independent sales representatives every year to cover high attrition
rates and meet expansion goals for its four primary business lines.
As the largest display marketer for books and gifts in North
America, the company needs 850 reps working in assigned territories to service 70,000
schools and 50,000 businesses. The cost of missed opportunities runs high when a
rep leaves and is not quickly replaced.
Like most companies that rely on independent reps for all
sales work, Books Are Fun faces a constant challenge in sourcing candidates who
do not always fall into easily identifiable and accessible talent pools. The supply
of potential applicants includes people who may not routinely post their résumés
on job boards or explore traditional job-seeking channels.
When sourcing itself becomes a major task in the recruiting
process, some companies determine that tapping outside recruiting firms may be the
most financially viable approach. In a 2008 NelsonHall survey, recruitment process
outsourcing providers reported a growing trend toward using RPO for contingent staffing.
In February 2007, Books Are Fun hired David Hammond as vice
president of sales recruitment and as part of a new management team brought in to
turn the company around. From the outset, Hammond was charged with re-engineering
the recruiting process to improve the quality of hires.
Hammond found that the company still relied on newspaper advertising
and job boards to source candidates, with six internal recruiters handling the full
load. Screening applicants consumed 70 percent of their time.
"It was very apparent that the organization needed a more
proactive approach and a sourcing strategy that would identify the profile for successful
reps," Hammond says.
"We knew that the most important part of the recruiting process
is the late-stage conversation that we have with a candidate about the job as a
lifestyle change rather than just another position. We needed our internal folks
to be able to focus on these late-stage conversations. It was a waste of time for
my staff to handle the screening process."
RPO for reps
The basic qualifications for Books Are Fun sales reps are minimal. Candidates must
be physically able to move the marketing materials and financially capable of making
a small investment to get started.
But the skills and levels of ambition necessary to stay with
the job and build a successful business are more complex. "The biggest challenge
is that people who are truly qualified and suitable are difficult to find," Hammond
says.
Hammond turned to RPO to improve sourcing and free his staff
from screening and administrative work. He wanted better technology to manage the
process, more outlets for sourcing and a more flexible approach to recruitment staffing
so that the recruitment effort could expand and contract as needed.
"As candidates enter and move through the recruitment funnel,
we want someone to handle the whole bottom end so that we only deal with the top,"
Hammond explains. He signed on for a one-year renewable contract with Pinstripe,
an RPO company based in Brookfield, Wisconsin.
"We began with a process of investigation and moved on to
technology and building out the back end of the technology process, and then we
identified the candidate profile," he says. The new recruiting process launched
on March 24.
With the new system, an applicant who passes through an initial
online screening moves to an additional online assessment. If the candidate passes
that test, a pop-up screen appears and asks the candidate to select an interview
time with a Pinstripe recruiter at a specific location. If the applicant survives
that stage, the applicant’s information passes into a new tracking system that schedules
a second interview with a Books Are Fun internal recruiter.
"In the past, Books Are Fun offered a contract to the first
qualified candidate that appeared," Hammond says. "Now we want to offer a contract
to the most qualified candidates only. Our new system generates enough volume to
provide us with real choices."
In the first eight weeks, the process harvested 16,000 online
résumés that met the basic criteria for sales reps. After screenings and initial
interviews, Pinstripe sent 330 candidates to Books Are Fun for additional screening
and interviews. Hammond expects to hire 30 to 45 from the group.
Books Are Fun’s internal recruiting function now runs with
a staff of three. Hammond’s goal is to flip the 70/30 split between time spent sourcing
and screening and time spent talking to candidates to an entirely new model where
the internal recruiters spend 70 percent of their time with candidates and 30 percent
on sourcing and administration.
"We’re getting there," he says.
Tracking results
Hammond now tracks a number of recruiting metrics on a daily or weekly basis, including
the total sourcing volume. He closely watches conversion rates, which measure how
many initial applicants make it through to the company interview. These rates are
a good measure of the quality of the sourcing strategy.
"One very important benefit is that I can report back to the
business leader for each of the business lines on the number of candidates for the
line and where they are in the recruiting process," Hammond says. "That level of
reporting and transparency had never been part of our ongoing dialogue about recruiting."
Hammond also tracks requisitions and time to fill at a granular
level.
"We can now begin to understand the cause of the delays,"
he notes. The 2008 NelsonHall study reports that RPO reduces average time-to-hire
by 43 percent.
In terms of total spend, Hammond expects that at worst, the
new model will be neutral against the old model.
"I think we will see some actual cost savings," he says. "But
if you look at our ability to fill positions in the territories faster and hold
on to customers, that has improved significantly. And this ability to replace reps
more quickly represents a very significant amount of money."
The 2008 NelsonHall study found that RPO lowers the cost of
recruitment by an average of 24 percent.
Hammond also anticipates a reduction in the company’s historic
attrition levels.
"We could see substantial cost savings from this," he notes.
"We incur heavy early-on expenses for training, shipping materials and the other
costs of putting a new rep in place. If we lose a rep quickly, it’s expensive. Improved
candidate assessment will help us minimize attrition."
Although Hammond is waiting for additional results before
he fully evaluates the new system, he is confident that outsourcing is the most
cost-effective and productive approach to maintain a sufficient supply of high-quality
reps.
"The new RPO approach is already embedded in our going-forward
strategy for recruiting," he notes.
Reshaping the funnel
Although the new approach to sourcing at Books Are Fun is producing better results
than the old model, it still takes a huge number of applicants coming in through
a very wide funnel to produce a fairly limited number of hires popping out the top.
Pinstripe CEO Sue Marks notes that the shape of the recruiting funnel varies dramatically
for different job categories.
In a recent assignment that entailed sourcing highly skilled
engineers, Pinstripe harvested 1,023 applicants, conducted 360 phone screens and
then sent 104 candidates for interviews with the client company.
"For the Books Are Fun salespeople, we wanted to cast a wide
net, and then put the applicants through user-friendly self-service online screening,"
Marks says.
Of the 16,000 applicants harvested for Books Are Fun, Pinstripe
phone-screened 2,200 using a 15-minute behaviorally based questionnaire.
"Especially for Books Are Fun and its parent, Reader’s
Digest, every applicant is also a potential customer, so we treat applicants
like customers," Marks notes. Pinstripe maintains the Books Are Fun contacts as
a separate secure database that the client company can pull back in-house at any
time.
Marks isn’t concerned about an initial search that produces
such a large number of applicants.
"If you search by sending the Boolean string out into the
deep Web, we create a large funnel. But then you can deconstruct that funnel to
determine which sources are most effective."
According to Marks, the key to sourcing is search engine optimization.
"In five years, we’ll be pushing jobs out in a targeted fashion,"
she says. "It will look like an RSS feed."
Pinstripe is now running pilot projects that give clients
a Facebook page with widgets that allow viewers to sign up as "fans" so that job
openings pop up on the viewer’s own Facebook page.
These new methods work particularly well for "selective" candidates,
who are commonly employed but may appear in career databases as job seekers.
"With selective and passive candidates, you have to keep up
your marketing efforts to move them along toward the open position," Marks says.
"We are constantly pinging passive candidates and monitoring selective candidates."
With these methods, recruiting closely resembles sales prospecting,
with databases of selective and passive candidates maintained in a fashion similar
to customer contacts. Marks notes that more companies are also turning to internships
to capture early applicants.
"Talent management is an ecosystem," Marks says. "The goal
is to make all processes work together for both internal and external candidates,
from the initial sourcing to hiring, onboarding, training, promotions and, finally,
tracking alumni."
The ecosystem approach pulls recruiting into a coherent strategy
for optimal results.
Workforce Management Online, July 2008 -- Register Now!
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