Strategies in National Recruiting

National Companies Crave Brand Consistency.  Their Recruiting Needs It Too.

There was a time when most business was local.  Even large national and multinational companies with a global presence largely operated out of centralized locations.  Today trends in acquisitions, deployment of technology, and the need for better access to customers, are driving companies toward increasingly dispersed locations nationwide.  This often requires teams of highly proficient professionals with specialized skills to be deployed or hired locally across the country.   However, maintaining consistent company culture across nationwide locations is vital, and this stringent consistency has extended into all of the functions that go into national hiring strategies.  From job postings, to candidate recruiting, to onboarding, and even rejection, hiring practices must be consistent, effective, and efficient.

To meet these trends, many companies have implemented National Recruiting strategies working with agencies to find, recruit, and onboard qualified candidates.  Often, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) work with sizeable groups of recruiting vendors to ensure healthy competition, cost control, and to realize the advantages of outsourcing while maintaining a single point of contact.

But like most strategies, the key to success is in the execution.   How is a client brand and culture ultimately represented to candidates?  Are national clients the priorities they should be?  Where is service actually coming from?  How is HR compliance being handled?

For companies recruiting on a national scale, the answers to these questions can have a huge impact on immediate needs such as filling positions quickly, and then to longer term strategic concerns such as overall brand quality, candidate experience, and impact on company culture.  There are key factors that should be considered in a national recruiting strategy.

National Customers Are Always a Priority, Right?
We all want to believe that we’re a #1 priority with any service provider.  In fact, we expect it when it comes to large scale corporate accounts.  However, the staffing industry is still largely local.  Most recruiting is largely performed on a local branch level, scattered throughout the towns and cities across all 50 States.  While that may sound ideal, the reality is that tapping into a branch network may not be the best fit for a national recruiting strategy.  Here’s why:

When a job order comes down through an MSP, it goes to a vendor who then often depends on a network of branch offices to fulfill the job order.  But those branch offices are focused on filling orders for their local clients who they have direct contact with.  In addition, ensuring that hundreds of branches consistently respond to the specific needs of a client on a national scales such as verifying skills, compliance, and other requirements, can be a challenge.

There’s nothing wrong with a branch network.  In fact, Nesco Resource has a network of over 90 branch office nationwide covering most of the Continental US.  It’s a great system, but sometimes not ideal for execution of national recruiting campaigns.   In fact, that’s part of the reason why we came up with a unique alternative.

While we do rely on an extensive branch network for some recruiting services in performance on national accounts, a greater number are managed through our National Recruiting Centers.  These centers work together to assess the needs of a position and recruit candidates quickly, putting a priority on filling national positions.

In addition to putting a priority on national recruiting work, a centralized system also consolidates processes.  After all, it is one thing to find a candidate, but it’s another set of challenges entirely to ensure all of the paperwork, drug tests, security clearances, and background checks are uniformly completed.

There are definitely some jobs that require a branch network.  These so called ‘boots on the ground’ jobs require a local relationship for positions needing a great deal of personal interaction in the screening, safety, and orientation process

Having both allows for a vendor to quickly respond and consistently perform.

Centralized Compliance Team
As mentioned early, compliance is a serious issue when it comes to filling positions.  Having a centralized compliance team working in tandem, but separated from the recruiting team streamlines the process and also leads to more consistent results.

The compliance team is responsible for contractual adherence to each program and onboarding of contractors whether through the SRC or a local branch when it falls under MSP programs. They send all required paperwork specific for each client when a candidate is hired. They initiate backgrounds and perform education verifications for the hires. They schedule drug test and follow up with candidates if test haven’t been taken.

In addition, this team actively follows up with candidates and vendors performing drug and backgrounds to push the process along ensuring a faster turnaround time for clients. The compliance team also reviews all drug and background for program compliance and verifies that all client specific paperwork has been completed before clearing the candidates to start. Lastly the compliance team handles all program audits monthly or quarterly. They are responsible for ensuring that Nesco Resource receives 100% compliance scores on all audits.

Again, requirements for compliance can vary greatly between different clients and the two teams working closely together ensures that the process is seamless.

Balancing Offshoring Challenges
Offshoring is a reality in the recruiting business and it has clear advantages, such as helping to reduce costs for processes.  Ultimately, offshoring allows companies to free up funding to grow their business by investing in other components of management, sales, and service personnel.

However, many times outsourcing can lead to poor service that erodes candidate experience, reflects poorly on a brand, and leads to slower, less effective service.

Nesco Resource carefully examined options when it was looking to expand its operations overseas.  Ultimately we chose to near-shore some operations in Costa Rica, and to couple these activities with our National and Strategic Recruiting Centers in Orlando and Columbus.  Costa Rica is commonly known for its eco-tourism, but it is also the corporate home in Central America to many Fortune 1000 companies who take advantage of a well-educated population, largely fluent in English.  In early 2015, Nesco Resource opened its first recruiting call center in Costa Rica.  The time zone parity with the US allows our teams to work closely together and the team’s familiarity with both English and Spanish helps facilitate communication with a wider swath of candidates in the United States.

Still the process of working together is closely controlled so that there is a seamless service model to both our clients and the talent pool.  Our goal with off shoring is to provide competitive pricing hand-in-hand with excellent client service and a seamless candidate experience.

Nesco Resource coordinates its Strategic Recruiting between offices in Ohio, Florida, and Costa Rica.

Focus and Flexibility
The employment needs of a large national company can vary across geographies and the skill and experience requirements of certain jobs.  Searching, recruiting, and onboarding for a wide range of positions requires a flexible approach to recruiting

Nesco Resource, for example, focuses its national recruiting efforts in the realm of engineering, IT and Professional services, while many local branch offices focus more so on the Light Industrial, Administrative roles.  This reflects the general mobility of a population and also speaks to finding the right skills for the right job over a wide geographic range.

Specializing in Engineering and IT services since the company was founded in 1956 has provided the experience to create our current structure, systems, and processes.  Those original roots have helped grow a National Recruiting structure that understands the needs of Engineering and IT positions as well as the needs of skilled manufacturing and administrative jobs.  The structure that we’ve created (a focused national recruiting team coupled with a branch network) helps maintain focus on the job at hand.

Why Candidate Experience Counts
Candidate experience is often overlooked when examining a recruiting process.  We’ve mentioned some of the pitfalls and opportunities within a national recruiting effort for candidate experience.  But why does it matter so much?  Very simply, candidate experience impacts every brand at every level.

Obviously, the impact of a candidate’s experience is clear if that candidate is hired: their feelings about the company that they are now working for can impact their performance and the performance of other employees.  This is reason enough to ensure candidate experience is a good one.

However, candidate experience can also impact the external brand image of a company.  For consumer companies, candidates are also often consumers of the brand’s products.  But even for B2B companies, candidates can eventually be employed at competitors or even customer sites where a bad experience can infect a large array of relationships. Candidate experience is important for every brand because its implications are so far reaching.

Nesco Resource surveys its candidates on a regular basis to measure experiences both good and bad.  These surveys measure one key element called the Net Promoter Score (NPS).  Very simply, the NPS score measures the number of people who would recommend your  products or services to someone else.  For example, within our pool of candidates nationwide, Nesco Resource garnered an NPS score of 52% compared to an industry average of 24%.  That means that more than double the average number of Nesco Resource candidates had a good enough experience to recommend us to others.  Knowing the NPS score your candidates are giving their experience is important because it impacts potentially large of areas of your business both internally and externally.

Summary
A national recruiting strategy must be more than simply casting a wide net for candidates.  Company culture, specific skill needs, and ensuring that candidates all have an optimal experience from beginning to end no matter the outcomes – these are all vitally important factors.  Choosing the partners to work with on national recruiting around these parameters is key to a successful strategy now and in the future.