Case Study: After a major acquisition, this software company acquired some help for its hiring staff.
Verity Inc. is successful in enabling organizations to maximize the return on their intellectual capital investment with intellectual capital management (ICM) solutions, but they were in need of a hiring solution in the form of RPO. During Veritys formative years, the software developer managed their talent acquisition through a combination of in-house recruiting resources and external agencies. In early 2004, Verity acquired Cardiff Software. The purchase created new complexities around process, systems, geography, and culture. Further contributing to this complexity, Veritys tenured internal recruiting staff departed from the organization. Verity was left with a significant number of open positions, and largely dependent upon generalists and hiring managers to fill open positions with the support of external resources. Veritys cost per hire was estimated to be in the range of 17 to 19 percent (the national average is 14.6) with no tracking of metrics associated with hiring manager satisfaction or time required to present or hire candidates. Verity had more than 20 open jobs that were critical, with an additional 20 open positions across the organization. They turned to Accolo for help.
In January 2005, Accolo and Verity executed a long-term contract with defined service level agreements (SLAs) and an additional on-site Accolo consultant who serves as the program manager. The implementation of SLAs ensured Verity receives top-tier recruiting service. SLAs measured time to introduce the hired candidate, hiring manager satisfaction, candidate satisfaction, and cost-per-hire, and includes components related to quality, speed, and cost, and contains meaningful penalties and bonuses for results. Through Accolos unique recruiting methodology and proprietary enabling technology, Verity was able to reduce their recruiting costs to 8.8 percent of compensation hired, time to introduce to 5.2 days, and determine that hiring manager satisfaction had improved significantly. In less than two weeks, Verity had a complete integrated recruitment department delivering results on all jobs. This consisted of on-site staff, a technology backbone to drive referrals and manage all applicant tracking, inclusion of all candidate sources, and a high degree of hiring manager TLC. There was also a measurable reduction of agency usage, resulting in estimated cost savings of $175,000 in Q4 2004 alone. RPO introduced standardization of the recruitment process including diversity sourcing for all jobs and tracking for EEOC complianceallowing Verity to limit exposure to legal actions.
