Outsourcing series: How to measure quality of service

Throughout this series, we have explored how outsourcing your recruitment can help you to gain a better hold of your organization's cost per hire and time to productivity, and we’ve laid out the key elements of measuring quality of hire. Although quality of hire measures can be elusive, determining the overall quality of your recruitment programs shouldn’t be as challenging.

According to Alfonso Nunez, Executive Director of Client Solutions at Allegis Global Solutions, “quality of hire should be one indicator of overall service quality, but the subject is much broader, and companies that are buying outsourced recruitment services want to ensure they are getting a program that is better than they can do themselves. As a service provider, we encounter this every day, with feedback from candidates, hiring managers, stakeholders and suppliers, as well as empirical service metrics creating a consensus of opinions that defines the quality of our service delivery".

In this final issue of our outsourcing blog series, we will take you through our recommendations for defining and measuring what makes a successful outsourced recruitment program.

Why quality of service is important

Understanding who the key stakeholders are and how they will be affected by your decision to outsource is essential when determining the quality of service. This includes hiring managers, candidates, finance and HR departments, senior management and procurement.

The definition of a successful outsourcing program is one that makes the lives easier for some or all of these groups, while at the same time delivering a tangible benefit for the business as a whole. This could be via a host of outcomes: decreased time to take on new employees, lower costs attached to recruitment, increased productivity, reduced attrition, positive impact on your brand through improving the candidate experience and improved data for decision making, to name a few.

Ultimately, RPO is about delivering the best candidates for your organization and, as identifying those individuals who can make a difference to your business becomes increasingly more critical, the value you can extract from outsourcing this function becomes easier to validate.

Pay attention to the data to achieve the best results

Organizations taking on an RPO solution can only determine their quality of service when there is access to concrete data on which to make a comparison. These are just some of the factors that can determine the quality of service an outsourced recruitment provider can bring to the solution:

• The total sum spent on the recruitment process per hire

• The speed at which a hire is recruited and on-boarded: time to brief, time to shortlist, time to offer

• The pace at which a candidate can adapt their way of working to complement their new organization's business model

• How well candidates fit with an organization's cultural fit and brand values

• Attrition and retention statistics

• Productivity and efficiency stats: ratio of CVs per role, CV to interview, interview to offer, offer to acceptance, acceptance to start

• Hiring manager time spent on hiring per role

• Admin hours spent on hiring per role

• New hire performance: performance against the rest of the employee population

• Time to full productivity

• Time to promotion

• Sales performance against the existing salesforce

Each of these metrics can provide clear insight into the performance of the recruitment function, with the potential to discern a clear delineation between candidates on-boarded via RPO and those recruited prior to an RPO model being implemented.

But let’s not underestimate the importance of subjective data as well. Regularly surveying the opinions of those who have used the service, using Net Promoter Scores (NPS) or other customer satisfaction ratings is key. They will provide real time and prima facie insights into how the processes, workflows, technologies, policies and philosophies you have applied to your recruiting efforts are being received and how they are impacting the success of your efforts. Perception after all is reality.

At Allegis Global Solutions (AGS), our RPO can help you to better assess quality by providing you with comprehensive data on these and a wide range of other metrics, enabling you to gain greater visibility into the performance and standard of your workforce.

Determining the quality of service is therefore all about putting together the many moving parts that make up a successful recruitment strategy - delivering an agile, affordable and, above all, high-quality recruitment package is the driving force of AGS.

So, what did you think of our outsourcing blog series? Have we helped to shed light on the practices and processes that could be of benefit to your business when taking on new recruits in the future? Let us know via LinkedIn about your recruitment success stories and any areas where you may be having trouble. We'd love to hear from you!