Winning Secrets: BMES's differentiated approach to co-developing the RPO business case with HR leaders

After winning gold for the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Partner category at Asia Recruitment Awards 2020, Singapore virtual awards ceremony, Boyd & Moore Executive Search’s (BMES) APAC, VP, Jonas Korbstein reveals the company's winning secrets.

BMES's three-pronged strategy is aimed at driving optimised partnering with clients which has enabled it to co-develop the RPO business case and stand out in the market.

Q How has your organisation’s RPO model and strategy evolved in recent times to meet your client’s needs?

Our RPO model and strategy is customised to each of our clients’ specific context and unique needs. As such, we have developed a robust approach to continuous improvement at BMES. As well as the regular reviews and touchpoints we detail below, we also have more formalised and structured mechanisms through which we evaluate performance for our clients, namely our Understand/Implement/Measure (UIM) methodology.

We use this with clients on a quarterly basis:

• Understand: What feedback do they have for us on their experience as a client? What has been the impact on their employer brand? Have we achieved key KPIs and do these need to be reassessed for the period ahead? What new challenges does our client have that we need to solve for? Evaluation of the candidate experience.
• Implement: Agree on new strategies to implement to upgrade the service level. For example, expansion to cover new business units/geographies; more back-office support; additional onsite recruiters; integrating additional hiring assessment criteria or employer branding strategies etc.
• Measure: Continuously evaluate performance through regular monthly review meetings, make changes as required.

This strategy is really about staying close to our clients, doing the simple things well, and ensuring our RPO partnerships continuously evolve to meet shifting needs. We can then adapt our model and strategy for each client to meet their specific requirements.

Q What are the key business drivers behind your value as an RPO partner?

We have a very differentiated approach to co-developing the RPO business case with our clients. At Boyd & Moore we’re proud of our approach to RPO partnering. RPOs only make sense if they solve specific challenges for clients: reducing time to offer; saving on agency costs; consolidating vendor volume; developing a consistent employer brand message; building capacity/capability; or where an intelligence driven approach can help to uncover key talent. In almost all instances, we work with our clients to build a business case, identifying which are the key levers for them.

At BMES our approach to improvement is continuous, and our analysis of areas we can optimise for our clients does not stop with building a business case. It is integrated into the full project lifecycle. Examples of how we do this are as follows:

• Having ears and eyes on the ground, having close feedback rounds with hiring managers, providing hiring manager training
• Regular performance review with our clients
• Proactive suggestions for improvement/efficiency gains: for example with one industrial client we are now introducing automated background/reference checking

Q How do you work closely with your HR clients to ensure that your role as an RPO partner fits into the bigger HR priorities? 

We do this through our enhanced approach to partnering with HR. Simply put, we know they are getting best value from us when we operate as an extension of their HR team.

To drive this optimised partnering with our clients we have established strategies, including:

• Ensuring that our onsite recruiters feel strongly part of two teams: our client’s HR team, and our BMES core team
• Our onsite recruiters receive significant coaching skills development in the area of stakeholder management – recognising that it is critical that they are able to build strong and trusting relationships with our clients’ hiring managers
• A robust key account management structure is put in place for all our RPO clients in addition to our onsite recruiter teams. Our key account manager effectively serves as an extension of our clients’ HR department, ensuring our solutions are deeply embedded, we develop a deep understanding of the business, and that the escalation points and routes to problem solving are clear and well-defined.

Q On to the most important part – results! How did you measure the ROI or milestones of your RPO service, and what are you most proud?

We measure our results both through some of the review meetings and forums outlined above, but also through our rigorous approach to providing data to our clients on the key metrics and KPIs we are looking to improve for them. Once we have jointly evaluated the business case for RPO with our clients, and identified those areas for improvement, we’re most proud of our ability to drive results, for example with one regional client we’ve achieved S$700K savings over two years through reduced agency use; closed all aging reqs within three months; and reduced time to offer from 83 to 39 days.

Our pride comes from having this positive impact for our clients, but also in enhancing the candidate experience through the hiring process.

Q How does your organisation stand out as an RPO partner when it comes to innovating and positively impacting the recruitment process?

Our biggest differentiator at Boyd & Moore is our Intelligence Centre in India. This enables us to integrate high-quality research and intelligence capability (candidate sourcing) at low cost for our clients, freeing up the time of our onsite recruiters and our clients’ HR teams to focus more on value-adding activities.

The BMES Intelligence Centre (BMIC) is staffed by over 100 sourcing and research experts, and is the bedrock of our RPO capability. It offers huge benefits to our clients, providing a strong talent pipeline for roles, meaning that HR and our onsite teams can really focus on optimising the candidate experience, and significantly reducing the time to offer.

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