Panduit Case Study. How Panduit's Hiring was Transformed Through Recruitment Process Outsourcing

Transcription

1 Panduit Case Study How Panduit's Hiring was Transformed Through Recruitment Process Outsourcing

2 Panduit is a technology solutions company operating out of Tinley Park, Illinois. Like many other companies that have highly technical positions to fill, Panduit was having hiring problems. Their recruiting was inefficient, expensive and sometimes delivered candidates months later than they should have been. For the front lines perspective on Panduit s hiring transformation is Mark Baulder, senior manager in Panduit s HR department. Mark started work at Panduit on the manufacturing side of things, his technical background giving him a rigorously scientific mindset and an appreciation for hard metrics. Soon after taking up a leadership role in HR, Mark realized that there was no time to waste in improving their recruiting function. With Mark in charge of finding a solution, HR started from the ground up, examining every cost and option open to them. Eventually, Mark and his team decided to consult an RPO for assistance with their hiring difficulties. Panduit is a relatively small, privately owned company with a very close knit staff and a family feel to the company culture. This meant that one of the criteria for any RPO that they decided to use was cultural alignment and long term compatibility. Mark and his team wanted consultants that were familiar with both their staffing needs and the hiring managers that would be evaluating the candidates. With this in mind, Panduit started a trial partnership with Accolo.

3 Hard Cost Savings of RPO So the big headline here is that Panduit s recruiting function saw a 30% overall cost reduction. Here s how they did it: One of the first major drains on Panduit s recruiting that Mark found was how much was being spent compensation for relocating new employees. After conducting a thorough cost analysis, Mark and his RPO partner were able put a special emphasis on trying to find more local talent. Through Accolo s sourcing efforts, they were able to substantially reduce these costs by finding more employees that lived closer to Panduit's facilites. They were even able to hire someone within walking distance! Another factor leading to the cost reduction in Panduit s recruiting process was a reevaluation of the company s job board subscriptions. By judging each job board or professional network subscription based on the number and quality of hires that it brought in, it was easy to see which were worth the money and which were just draining HR s resources. The final factor contributing to this dramatic cut in cost was the reduction in Panduit s full time recruiting staff. As you can see from the chart below, Panduit's hiring needs were highly dynamic, changing dramatically from one quarter to the next. Their pre-rpo recruiting staff ranged from 3 to 6 full time employees, depending on seasonal hiring demands. After partnering up with Accolo, they were able to replace their ineffectual contract recruiter staff with a single, on-site RPO liaison. Besides cutting staffing costs, the RPO liaison was able to provide invaluable industry advice to the HR team as well as make sure that the candidates that Accolo was sourcing were good fits with hiring managers at Panduit.

4 Time to Fill Reducing the time it took to hire new employees was one of Panduit s primary goals from the beginning of this process. Technology companies need to stay on the cutting edge to be competitive, and technical position vacancies slow things down immensely. An unfilled position can mean the difference between being the first company to launch a product and a competitor getting to it first. The soft cost of any extended vacancy is a large decrease in productivity. When a member is missing from a team, it means that the rest of them will have to make up the work in the meantime. Mark calculated that an absent team member meant an extra 20 hours of work per-week for the remaining members to get through. Through work with their RPO, Panduit was able to reduce their average time to fill technical positions from 254 days to 139 days, a whopping 45% reduction. The impact of filling positions a full three months sooner than they used to has been huge. Mark calculated that by reducing the time to fill by just 28 days, a company that had 100 vacancies per year could save upwards of half a million dollars from the increased productivity. Clearly, optimizing the hiring process for speed and efficiency pays in more ways than one.

5 Then and Now Before outsourcing their recruiting function, Panduit s hiring managers were very dissatisfied with the hiring process. Mark, being the outside in thinker that he is, framed HR support to hiring managers like a business unto itself. He asked the question, Would they be happy to pay for our services? The answer was a resounding "No." Before Panduit partnered up with Accolo, talent acquisition was like a black hole. Notifications of vacant positions would be filed and it would take weeks before anyone even acknowledged the request. It was so bad that someone in HR didn t hear back about a job in his own department for several weeks, and this was from someone who sat 50 feet away from him! In equal parts the efforts of Mark and his team and the sourcing services that their RPO provided them, Panduit s initiative to improve their hiring process was a resounding success. Not only are hires found faster for less, but everyone, from the hiring managers to the executives are much happier with Panduit s recruiting process. To get a more in-depth look at Panduit's RPO experience, check out the complementary Webinar to this case study.

6 About Accolo Accolo manages and optimizes the internal recruiting function for small and mid:sized companies. Through a fully integrated combination of people, process, technology, and resources, Accolo provides its clients with a robust solution for all of their hiring needs. Accolo is a founding member of the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association ( and its investors include Altos Ventures ( Vedior (Amsterdam: VDR, and TriNet ( For more information, visit