Razz and Harass part 2
Upon reflection, it’s really surprising that Recruiting as a Service (RaaS) hasn’t taken quick root in the culture. A service priced as a subscription, focused on helping the organization achieve specific staffing, retention and attrition targets is good for everyone. Recruiting shifts from a highly variable cost to something controlled and predictable.
The very few mentions of the RaaS concept really involve the idea of service levels and service quality, the surprising notion that Recruiting should be a customer centric discipline. That’s quite unlike the notion I’m suggesting here. “Recruiting as a Service” is an uninterrupted flow of Recruiting to a customer using a subscription model. Pricing would be on a “per head basis” just like other X as a Service offerings are.
The math is pretty straight forward. Number of employees times forecast growth in revenue times attrition rate gets you pretty close to the number of transactions. A properly written contract would make allowances for variations in growth and attrition. You might even imagine some bonus structure tied to revenue growth, profitability and targeted retention.
The really impressive aspect of this way of delivering recruiting is that the Recruiting Provider (I’m currently boycotting the use of the term RPO…it no longer carries a distinct meaning), is immediately incented to deliver the right performance. Contract reviews are structurally incented to review departmental attrition and retention. The role of hiring in corporate culture development would be obvious in the second or third performance review.
From a buyer’s perspective, having a recruiting function that is a predictable component of G&A spend while offering performance incentives that improve productivity is a sweet move forward from the status quo. Although it is not a uniform generalization, most hiring managers experience consistent disappointment with their recruiting providers, internal or external.
For Recruiters (especially those who see the discipline as an art form), the structure of real cost control and accountability is likely to provide a flowering of technique, simplification and improvements to the process. The RaaS model offers tight performance constraints at a system level. No more transactional focus is possible when the system rewards on a per head basis across the population.
I’m very interested in understanding your reaction to this idea.
