0606_Manpower R&S

Challenge

W

hen Visteon Corporation spun off from former parent Ford Motor Co. in 2000, the tier-one automotive engineering and systems provider had to decide how it wanted to handle employee recruiting.

At the time, Visteon had no specialized recruiting professionals and its cycle time for new hires averaged more than 70 days. The company’s options were to build a recruiting team from the ground up or outsource the non-core recruiting function.

Solution

Visteon partnered with Manpower’s Resource Consulting Group (now Manpower Business Solutions) to manage its professional employee recruitment process, including candidate sourcing, screening, hiring and on-boarding at approximately 25 U.S. locations. This solution, now known as Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), was ahead of its time just six years ago.

One of the most important steps in achieving a successful RPO relationship is the integration of RPO processes into the existing business structure and culture. With that in mind, Manpower and Visteon set out to make RPO a seamless extension of the organization.

A team of 15 people was selected to reside at the Visteon corporate offices. The group included specialty recruiters in finance and engineering to source, identify and evaluate candidate talent; staffing consultants who interface with Visteon hiring managers and human resources professionals to handle candidate offers; and placement coordinators who manage new hire on-boarding.

Initially, the team was charged with managing direct hires for the product development group, which consisted mainly of engineers, and staff groups that included human resources and finance professionals. Within 18 months, hiring for manufacturing positions was added to the RPO program. At the three-year mark, growth continued with the addition of hourly and salaried hiring for new plant launches and management of the program that assists current Visteon employees seeking other positions within the organization. After four years, the program was extended again, and Manpower Business Solutions started working with Visteon to redeploy talent within Visteon when program launches came to an end or positions were eliminated.

Continued success and improvements resulted in further expansion for the program, including a targeted, pilot hiring program in Mexico as a means to possibly expand the level of U.S. services into that country. Today, the RPO team supports Visteon in virtually all hiring, including specialty recruiting needs, giving it a capacity of about 1,000 internal and external placements annually.

Until an employee’s first day, Manpower Business Solutions, through the RPO program, serves as the face of the automotive supplier by overseeing sourcing and talent reviews; scheduling interviews; managing offers; handling post-offer processing, and all other communication and interaction with candidates.

In addition to the hiring programs, Manpower Business Solutions continues to assist Visteon in redeploying talent within Visteon. Manpower Business Solutions also manages an employee voluntary resignation/retirement process that ensures smooth transitions from Visteon as well as recovering any company assets held by departing employees.

Results

With its innovative HR strategies and process management expertise, the RPO program has earned high praise from Visteon by delivering performance improvement, cost savings, workforce diversity and organizational flexibility.

Not only does Manpower Business Solutions score well on service evaluations from hiring managers, but metrics also show that the programs are good for Visteon’s business.

As an end-to-end program, RPO has:

• Reduced cycle time-to-hire from 74 days to 27 days.
• Built candidate retention at 90 days to more than 99 percent.
• Hired nearly 5,000 people to date.
• Consistently scored “exceeds expectations” on new hire and customer satisfaction surveys.

In May 2006, Manpower Business Solutions received the Visteon Important Partner award in recognition of its high level of supplier performance.

As the Visteon and Manpower Business Solutions partnership enters its sixth year, the RPO program continues to increase service offerings, streamline processes and achieve hard-dollar cost savings. Meanwhile, Visteon points to the RPO program as a benchmark for HR vendors providing outsourced services.