This article originally appeared in ShortList on 15 March 2013 4:12pm
Freelance RPO creeping into agencies' traditional SME client base: Clennett
Online freelance recruitment site
RecruitLoop has opened up recruitment outsourcing to SME employers � a customer
base that had previously been one in which agency recruiters didn't have to
compete with RPO, says industry trainer Ross Clennett.
Clennett told an RCSA breakfast in Sydney yesterday that RecruitLoop was one of
a number of new "competitive pressures and threats" to recruitment companies
that had sprung up since the GFC.
"We've had the lower-end of the market RPO-free because, as John Rawlinson, the
CEO of Talent2,
said at the RCSA International Conference two years ago, unless a company is
recruiting at least 100 positions a year an RPO is unlikely to be financially
viable for them," he said.
"The whole [recruitment] industry went 'Phew! That's a relief.' But then these
guys came along - RecruitLoop."
The platform was founded
in 2011 and lets employers choose from a pool of pre-vetted consultants.
They then pay the recruiter an hourly rate to undertake part or all of the
recruitment process.
RecruitLoop takes a 15% cut from the hourly rate. It currently has about 30
recruiters registered on its website, charging between $95 and $150 an hour.
The average cost per hiring assignment is about $1,400, according to the site.
Clennett said one of RecruitLoop's selling points was its claim that clients
could save up to 80% on traditional recruitment agency fees.
He noted that Talent2 was listed as a client on its website.
"When we've got our own industry players using this sort of service, you have to
acknowledge that they're doing a pretty good job."
We're an alternative, not a replacement: RecruitLoop
RecruitLoop co-founder Michael
Overell told Shortlist the platform was not typically taking market share
from agencies.
"When we're working with SMEs, in the vast majority of cases these are not
companies that have been working previously with recruitment agencies," he said.
Overell said often RecruitLoop clients were outsourcing recruitment for the
first time, because the traditional agency model was too expensive for them.
He said RecruitLoop was seeing "a fair bit of interest" from recruitment agency
customers both in Australia and abroad, who were able to cherry-pick specific
elements from the company's service offering.
Overell said clients like Talent2 used unbundled tools such as RecruitLoop's
video interviewing software, to increase efficiency in their own recruitment
process.
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