Organizations and companies often retain professional recruiters or outsource some of the process to recruitment agencies. External recruitment is attracting and selecting employees from outside the organization.

The recruitment industry has four main types of agencies:

• In-house recruitment.

• Employment agencies,

• Recruitment websites and job search engines,

• "Headhunters" for executive and professional recruitment, and

• Passive Candidate Research Firms / Sourcing Firms

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer outsources all or part of its recruitment activities to an external agency or service provider.

RPO providers manage the entire recruiting process from job profiling through the on-boarding of the new hire. A properly managed RPO improves a company's time to hire, increase the quality of the candidate pool, provide verifiable metrics, reduce cost and improve governmental compliance.

As a recruiter, one used to get a lot of resumes and phone calls from people wanting to come in. Many times they weren't what a recruiter was looking for and can't even count the number of unsolicited resumes received per week because there are many, especially for the more generalized positions. One should look for relevant experience, education, tenure, and overall resume presentation. Time is money and you can't waste it on folks that don't meet the minimum criteria. Probably 75-80% of the resumes a recruiter get can't be used. When an employer is paying you to find what they can't find themselves you have to send the cream of the crop, the best one!

So one should initially spend a lot of time getting a clear picture as to what the company is looking for? Will my candidate fit in? What are they offering? Is the compensation as per the market standard? location? The skills - absolute and what doesn't mean that much. Is the staff young older and mature? Look at what kind of people they tend to hire.

With the current scenario of market recession, when economic times get rough, we – as recruiters – must adjust our approach. Layoffs, budget cuts, and nervous candidates change our landscape and require us to operate differently if we’re to survive. So what best a corporate recruiters should do when the going gets tough?

1. Show your value. We should not only do our work well, but show our work, too. i.e:

• recruiting the best talent

• consulting with the hiring teams to select the best by leading pre-interview and post-interview debriefs

• reducing the hiring costs or improving ROI with our existing budget and delivering real value to the business.

Recruiting teams and HR that can’t show their ROI to the business often get cut first in a downturn.

2. Fight for your budgets. One should do best to protect the recruitment branding and outreach budgets because it can take years to build a good employer brand, but only a few months to kill one.

3. Prioritize and Align. Not all requirements are created equal therefore the ratio of open requirements to recruiter will worsen in a downturn, as your company will likely cut resources. Ensure you meet regularly with management to understand priorities among the few growth positions and all of the backfills. So, alignment and focus to business priorities is always key, but it’s especially key in a down economy.

4. Adjust your pitch. The layoffs in downsizing may generate mass applicants, but the top talent – especially more passive tech candidates – may become a lot less willing to consider a move in a down market. So, finding ways to become more appealing and differentiated from the competitors is the best thing. To demonstrate through the job postings and interview process - the investments your company is making or has recently made is a plus point.

5. Take full advantage of your existing resources. Make sure you’re taking full advantage of the job board posting and database access you are paying for.

6. Make every hire count. Quality is the key. Training on hiring the right kind of talent in order to avoid the long-term cost of a hiring mistake.

7. Train hiring managers to fish. To find ways to better leverage your hiring managers to learn more about the hiring managers’ projects, discuss critical hiring priorities, and talk about the employee referral program.

Tough times or downsizing provide great leadership opportunities. Hoping you can leverage this document to help you think through the tradeoffs you will and won’t make as you face such time.