Description
A “recovery point objective” or “RPO”, is defined by business continuity planning. It is the maximum tolerable period in which data might be lost from an IT service due to a major incident.[1] The RPO gives systems designers a limit to work to. For instance, if the RPO is set to 4 hours, then in practice, offsite mirrored backups must be continuously maintained- a daily offsite backup on tape will not suffice.
STUDY ON RPO IN INDIA AT CUSTOMER EMPOWERING SERVICES PVT. LTD
INDEX Table of Contents:
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Abstract Objective of the study Introduction Company Profile Limitations of the Study Evolution of RPO in India ? Business process outsourcing (BPO) ? Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) ? Recruitment Process Outsourcing 7. BUSINESS CONCEPT OF RPO ? Types Of Contracts ? INS ? Employment Types 22 30 35 55 56 60 69
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ABSTRACT
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer outsources or transfers all or part of its recruitment activities to an external service provider. India is a booming market for RPO, which followed the trend in outsourcing in the foot steps of BPO, KPO and LPO ventures from US and Europe based companies.
This project is undertaken to study the functioning of RPO and its business specifically in international market. The project focuses primarily on US IT market.
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Objectives of the Study
1. To study the business model of RPO. 2. To know the recruitment process in overseas market. 3. To study the outsourced staffing done by RPOs
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AT
Customer Empowering Services
INTRODUCTION OUT SOURCING Outsourcing is subcontracting a process, such as product design or manufacturing, to a third-party company. Outsourcing became part of the business lexicon during the 1980s. The decision to outsource is often made in the interest of lowering firm costs, redirecting or conserving energy directed at the competencies of a particular business, or to make more efficient use of labor, capital, technology and resources Overview Outsourcing involves the transfer of the management and/or day-today execution of an entire business function to an external service provider. The client organization and the supplier enter into a contractual agreement that defines the transferred services. Under the agreement the supplier acquires the means of production in the form of a transfer of people, assets and other resources from the client. The client agrees to procure the services from the supplier for the term of the contract. Business segments typically outsourced include information technology, human resources, facilities and real estate management, and accounting. Many companies also outsource
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customer support and call center functions like telemarketing, customer services, market research, manufacturing and engineering. Outsourcing and offshoring are used interchangeably in public discourse despite important technical differences. Outsourcing involves contracting with a supplier, which may or may not involve some degree of offshoring. Offshoring is the transfer of an organizational function to another country, regardless of whether the work is outsourced or stays within the same corporation. With increasing globalization of outsourcing companies, the distinction between outsourcing and offshoring will become less clear over time. This is evident in the increasing presence of Indian outsourcing companies in the US and UK. The globalization of outsourcing operating models has resulted in new terms such as nearshoring and rightshoring that reflect the changing mix of locations. This is seen in the opening of offices and operations centers by Indian companies in the U.S. and UK. Multisourcing refers to large (predominantly IT) outsourcing agreements. Multisourcing is a framework to enable different parts of the client business to be sourced from different suppliers. This requires a governance model that communicates strategy, clearly defines responsibility and has end-to-end integration.
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Process of outsourcing Deciding to outsource The decision to outsource is taken at a strategic level and normally requires board approval. Outsourcing is the divestiture of a business function involving the transfer of people and the sale of assets to the supplier. The process begins with the client identifying what is to be outsourced and building a business case to justify the decision. Only once a high level business case has been established for the scope of services will a search begin to choose an outsourcing partner. Supplier proposals A Request for Proposal (RFP) is issued to the shortlist suppliers requesting a proposal and a price. Supplier competition A competition is held where the client marks and scores the supplier proposals. This may involve a number of face-to-face meetings to clarify the client requirements and the supplier response. The suppliers will be qualified out until only a few remain. This is known as down select in the industry. It is normal to go into the due diligence stage with two suppliers to maintain the competition. Following due diligence the suppliers submit a “best and final offer” (BAFO) for the client to make the final down select decision to
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one supplier. It is not unusual for two suppliers to go into competitive negotiations. Negotiations The negotiations take the original RFP, the supplier proposals, BAFO submissions and convert these into the contractual agreement between the client and the supplier. This stage finalizes the documentation and the final pricing structure. Contract finalization At the heart of every outsourcing deal is a contractual agreement that defines how the client and the supplier will work together. This is a legally binding document and is core to the governance of the relationship. There are three significant dates that each party signs up to the contract signature date, the effective date when the contract terms become active and a service commencement date when the supplier will take over the services. Transition The transition will begin from the effective date and normally run until four months after service commencement date. This is the process for the staff transfer and the take-on of services.
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Transformation The Transformation is the execution of a set of projects to implement the Service Level Agreement (SLA), to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) or to implement new Services. Emphasis is on ‘standardisation’ and ‘centralisation’. Ongoing service delivery This is the execution of the agreement and lasts for the term of the contract. Termination or renewal Near the end of the contract term a decision will be made to terminate or renew the contract. Termination may involve taking back services (insourcing) or the transfer of services to another supplier. Reasons for outsourcing Organizations that outsource are seeking to realize benefits or address the following issues: • Cost savings:The lowering of the overall cost of the service to the business. This will involve reducing the scope, defining quality levels, repricing, re-negotiation, cost re-structuring. Access to lower cost
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economies through offshoring called “labor arbitrage” generated by the wage gap between industrialized and developing nations. • Cost restructuring:Operating leverage is a measure that compares fixed costs to variable costs. Outsourcing changes the balance of this ratio by offering a move from fixed to variable cost and also by making variable costs more predictable. • Improve quality:Achieve a step change in quality through contracting out the service with a new Service Level Agreement. • Knowledge:Access to intellectual property and wider experience and knowledge. • Contract:Services will be provided to a legally binding contract with financial penalties and legal redress. This is not the case with internal services.
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• Operational expertise:Access to operational best practice that would be too difficult or time consuming to develop in-house. • Staffing issues:Access to a larger talent pool and a sustainable source of skills. • Capacity management:An improved method of capacity management of services and technology where the risk in providing the excess capacity is borne by the supplier. • Catalyst for change:An organization can use an outsourcing agreement as a catalyst for major step change that can not be achieved alone. The outsourcer becomes a Change agent in the process. • Reduce time to market:The acceleration of the development or production of a product through the additional capability brought by the supplier. • Commodification:The trend of standardizing business processes, IT Services and application services enabling businesses to intelligently buy at the
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right price. Allows a wide range of businesses access to services previously only available to large corporations. • Risk management:An approach to risk management for some types of risks is to partner with an outsourcer who is better able to provide the mitigation. • Time zone:A sequential task can be done during normal day shift in different time zones – to make it seamlessly available 24x7. Same/similar can be done on a longer term between earth’s hemispheres of summer/winter. • Customer Pressure:Customers may see benefits in dealing with your company, but are not happy with the performance of certain elements of the business, which they may not see a solution to except through outsourcing. Criticisms of outsourcing Public opinion There is a strong public opinion regarding outsourcing (especially when combined with offshoring) that outsourcing damages a local labor market. Outsourcing is the transfer of the delivery of services which affects
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both jobs and individuals. It is difficult to dispute that outsourcing has a detrimental effect on individuals who face job disruption and employment insecurity; however, its supporters believe that outsourcing should bring down prices, providing greater economic benefit to all. There are legal protections in the European Union regulations called the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment). Labor laws in the United States are not as protective as those in the European Union. A study has attempted to show that public controversies about outsourcing in the U.S. have much more to do with class and ethnic tensions within the U.S. itself, than with actual impacts of outsourcing. Against shareholder views For a publicly listed company it is the responsibility of the board to run the business for the shareholders. This means taking into consideration the views of the shareholders. Shareholders may be interested in return on investment and/or social responsibility. The board may decide that outsourcing is an appropriate strategy for the business. Shareholders have a responsibility to make their views known to the board of directors if they are against outsourcing.
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Failure to realize business value The main business criticism of outsourcing is that it fails to realize the business value that the outsourcer promised the client. Language skills In the area of call centers end-user-experience is deemed to be of lower quality when a service is outsourced. This is exacerbated when outsourcing is combined with off-shoring to regions where the first language and culture are different. The questionable quality is particularly evident when call centers that service the public are outsourced and offshored. There are a number of the public who find the linguistics features such as accents, word use and phraseology different which may make call center agents difficult to understand. The visual clues that are present in face-toface encounters are missing from the call center interactions and this also may lead to misunderstandings and difficulties.
Social responsibility Some argue that the outsourcing of jobs (particularly off-shore) exploits the lower paid workers. A contrary view is that more people are employed and benefit from paid work.
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Quality of service Quality of service is measured through a service level agreement (SLA) in the outsourcing contract. In poorly defined contracts there is no measure of quality or SLA defined. Even when an SLA exists it may not be to the same level as previously enjoyed. This may be due to the process of implementing proper objective measurement and reporting which is being done for the first time. It may also be lower quality through design to match the lower price. There are a number of stakeholders who are affected and there is no single view of quality. The CEO may view the lower quality acceptable to meet the business needs at the right price. The retained management team may view quality as slipping compared to what they previously achieved. The end consumer of the service may also receive a change in service that is within agreed SLAs but is still perceived as inadequate. The supplier may view quality in purely meeting the defined SLAs regardless of perception or ability to do better. Quality in terms of end-user-experience is best measured through customer satisfaction questionnaires which are professionally designed to capture an unbiased view of quality. Surveys can be one of research. This
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allows quality to be tracked over time and also for corrective action to be identified and taken. Staff turnover The staff turnover of employee who originally transferred to the outsourcer is a concern for many companies. Turnover is higher under an outsourcer and key company skills may be lost with retention outside of the control of the company. In outsourcing offshore there is an issue of staff turnover in the outsourcer companies call centers. It is quite normal for such companies to replace its entire workforce each year in a call center. This inhibits the buildup of customer knowledge and keeps quality at a low level. Company knowledge Outsourcing could lead to communication problems with transferred employees. For example before transfer staff have access to broadcast company e-mail informing them of new products, procedures etc. Once in the outsourcing organization the same access may not be available. Also to reduce costs, some outsource employees may not have access to e-mail, but any information which is new is delivered in team meetings.
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Qualifications of outsourcers The outsourcer may replace staff with less qualified people or with people with different non-equivalent qualifications. In the engineering discipline there has been a debate about the number of engineers being produced by the major economies of the United States, India and China. The argument centers around the definition of an engineering graduate and also disputed numbers. The closest comparable numbers of annual gradates of four-year degrees are United States (137,437) India (112,000) and China (351,537). Work, labour, and economy Net labour movements Productivity Offshore outsourcing for the purpose of saving cost can often have a negative influence on the real productivity of a company. Rather than investing in technology to improve productivity, companies gain non-real productivity by hiring fewer people locally and outsourcing work to less productive facilities offshore that appear to be more productive simply because the workers are paid less. Sometimes, this can lead to strange contradictions where workers in a third world country using hand tools can appear to be more productive than a U.S. worker using advanced computer
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controlled machine tools, simply because their salary appears to be less in terms of U.S. dollars. In contrast, increases in real productivity are the result of more productive tools or methods of operating that make it possible for a worker to do more work. Non-real productivity gains are the result of shifting work to lower paid workers, often without regards to real productivity. The net result of choosing non-real over real productivity gain is that the company falls behind and obsoletes itself overtime rather than making real investments in productivity. Standpoint of labor From the standpoint of labor within countries on the negative end of outsourcing this may represent a new threat, contributing to rampant worker insecurity, and reflective of the general process of globalization (see Krugman, Paul (2006). “Feeling No Pain.” New York Times, March 6, 2006). While the “outsourcing” process may provide benefits to less developed countries or global society as a whole, in some form and to some degree – include rising wages or increasing standards of living – these benefits are not secure. Further, the term outsourcing is also used to describe a process by which an internal department, equipment as well as personnel, is sold to a service provider, who may retain the workforce on worse
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conditions or discharge them in the short term. The affected workers thus often feel they are being “sold down the river.” The U.S. Outsourcing became a popular political issue in the United States during the 2004 U.S. presidential election. The political debate centered on outsourcing’s consequences for the domestic U.S. workforce. Democratic U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry criticized U.S. firms that outsource jobs abroad or that incorporate overseas in tax havens to avoid paying their fair share of U.S. taxes during his 2004 campaign, calling such firms “Benedict Arnold corporations”. Criticism of outsourcing, from the perspective of U.S. citizens, by-and-large, revolves around the costs associated with transferring control of the labor process to an external entity in another country. A Zogby International poll conducted in August 2004 found that 71% of American voters believed that “outsourcing jobs overseas” hurt the economy while another 62% believed that the U.S. government should impose some legislative action against companies that transfer domestic jobs overseas, possibly in the form of increased taxes on companies that outsource. One given rationale is the extremely high corporate income tax rate in the U.S. relative to other OECD nations, and the peculiar practice of taxing revenues earned outside of U.S. jurisdiction, a
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very uncommon practice. It is argued that lowering the corporate income tax and ending the double-taxation of foreign-derived revenue (taxed once in the nation where the revenue was raised, and once from the U.S.) will alleviate corporate outsourcing and make the U.S. more attractive to foreign companies. Sarbanes-Oxley has also been cited as a factor for corporate flight from U.S. jurisdiction. Policy solutions to outsourcing are also criticized. Security Before outsourcing an organization is responsible for the actions of all their staff and liable for their actions. When these same people are transferred to an outsourcer they may not change desk but their legal status has changed. They no-longer are directly employed or responsible to the organization. This causes legal, security and compliance issues that need to be addressed through the contract between the client and the suppliers. This is one of the most complex areas of outsourcing and requires a specialist third party adviser. Fraud Fraud is a specific security issue that is criminal activity whether it is by employees or the supplier staff. It can be argued that fraud is more likely when outsourcers are involved. In April 2005, a high-profile case involving
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the theft of $350,000 from four Citibank customers occurred when call center workers, acquired the passwords to customer accounts and transferred the money to their own accounts opened under fictitious names. Citibank did not find out about the problem until the American customers noticed discrepancies with their accounts and notified the bank.
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COMPANY PROFILE
CES Ltd is a Business Consulting and Business Process Outsourcing services provider, registered in India, with subsidiary offices in Chicago, U.S. CES Ltd also has operational offices in Princeton, NJ, and Stamford, CT. CES Business Consulting practice provides comprehensive, full life-cycle business strategies and IT-enabled initiatives, with deep domain expertise in Oracle® and Linux®.
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CES Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) leverages available technologies and in-house solutions to automate process tasks, while offering instantaneous ramp-up without compromising on service level metrics mandated by the clients. CES BPO offerings entail full life cycle customer support for • • Internet-based retailers and multi-channel retailers Data management (collection and programming) services for market research companies and • Recruitment Process support for Global IT Services companies In the last three years of business, we have grown to over fifty members’ team strength in the U.S., with another 400 people in India, with established operations and sales offices at key locations worldwide to enable true Global-to-Local engagement experience.
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Limitations of the Study • The study is limited only to the market of US • The information is limited as these are confidential. • The study is limited to only Information Technology which includes only Software Application Programming (SAP)
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EVOLUTION OF RPO IN INDIA Business process outsourcing (BPO)
Business process outsourcing (BPO) contains the transmission of processes along with the associated operational activities and responsibilities, to a third party with at least a guaranteed equal service level and where the client contains a firm grip over the (activities of the) vendor for mutual long term success. BPO is positively related to the search for more efficient organizational designs: cost reduction, productivity growth and innovative capabilities. Hence, a source for strategic advantage.
Traditionally, BPO is undertaken by manufacturing firms. For instance Coca Cola, where almost the entire supply chain is outsourced and the company is essentially becoming a marketing organization. However, BPO is nowadays rapidly conquering the service oriented firms as well. A well-known example is provided by the Bank of America, who outsourced their entire HR function to Exult, one of the leading Human Resources BPO vendors.
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BPO is often divided into two categories: back office outsourcing, which includes internal business functions such as billing or purchasing, and front office outsourcing, which includes customer-related services such as marketing or tech support. The endless opportunities IT provides, stimulates (cross-border) BPO activities. BPO that is contracted outside a company's own country is sometimes called offshore outsourcing. BPO that is contracted to a company's neighboring country is sometimes called nearshore outsourcing, and BPO that is contracted within the company's own country is sometimes called onshore outsourcing. The most common examples of BPO are call centers, human resources, accounting and payroll outsourcing.
Use of a BPO as opposed to an application service provider (ASP) usually also means that a certain amount of risk is transferred to the company that is running the process elements on behalf of the outsourcer. BPO includes the software, the process management, and the people to operate the service, while a typical ASP model includes only the provision of access to functionalities and features provided or 'served up' through the use of software, usually via web browser to the customer. BPO is a part of the outsourcing industry. It is dependent on information technology, hence it
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is also referred to as information technology enabled services or ITES. Knowledge process outsourcing and legal process outsourcing are some of the subsets of business process outsourcing.
ITES
Information technology enabled services, or ITES, is a form of outsourced service which has emerged due to involvement of IT in various fields such as banking and finance, telecommunications, insurance, etc. Some of the examples of ITES are medical transcription, back-office accounting, insurance claim, credit card processing and many more.
Firms usually from developed countries outsource such services to countries like Egypt, India, Bangladesh, China, Romania and Philippines in order to gain from large talent pool and low labor cost.
Industry size
India has revenues of 6.4 billion USD[4] from offshore BPO and 36billion USD from IT and total BPO. India thus has some 5-6% share of
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the total BPO Industry, but a commanding 63% share of the offshore component. This 63% is a drop from the 70% offshore share that India enjoyed last year, despite the industry growing 38% in India last year, other locations like Eastern Europe, Philippines, Egypt and South Africa have emerged to take a share of the market. China is also trying to grow from a very small base in this industry. However, while the BPO industry is expected to continue to grow in India, its market share of the offshore piece is expected to decline.
The top five Indian BPO exporters for 2006-2007 according to NASSCOM are Genpact, WNS Global Services, Transworks Information Services, IBM-daksh, and TCS BPO.
The global BPO Industry is estimated to be worth 120–150 billion dollars, of this the offshore BPO is estimated to be some US$11.4 Billion. [citation needed]
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Flexibility in practice
One of the most important advantage of BPO is the way in which it helps to increase a company’s flexibility. However, several sources have different ways in which they perceive organizational flexibility. Therefore business process outsourcing enhances the flexibility of an organization in different ways.
• Most services provided by BPO vendors are offered on a fee-forservice basis. This helps a company becoming more flexible by transforming fixed into variable costs. A variable cost structure helps a company responding to changes in required capacity and does not requisite a company in investing in assets and hereby making the company more flexible. Outsourcing of for instance a fraction of the workforce provides firm flexibility and reconfiguring resource deployments and reduce response times to major environmental changes.
• Another way in which BPO contributes to a company’s flexibility is that a company is able to focus on it’s core competencies, without being burdened by the demands of bureaucratic dictate. Key employees are
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herewith released from performing non-core or administrative processes and can invest more time and energy in building the firm’s core businesses. The key in this lies in knowing, which of the main value drivers to focus on – customer intimacy, product leadership, or operate excellence. This is exemplified by for instance the case of Dell. Focusing on one of these drivers instead of more helps a company create a competitive edge. Herewith the company becomes more responsive and is able to react faster on changes in a an organization’s environment.
• A third way in which BPO increases organizational flexibility is by increasing the speed of business processes. Using techniques such as linear programming is a way to reduce cycle time and inventory levels, which reduces a company’s slack. Supply chain management with the effective use of supply chain partners and business process outsourcing increases the speed of several business processes, such as the throughput in the case of a manufacturing company.
• Finally, flexibility is seen as a stage in the organizational life cycle. For instance in the case of Nortel, which used to be a very rigid and bureaucratic organization, BPO helped to transform the company from a
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bureaucratic organization into a very agile organization by means of BPO. A company can hereby help maintaining ambitious growth goals, which do not fit with regular incumbent strategies. BPO therefore allows firms to retain their entrepreneurial speed and agility, which they would otherwise sacrifice in order to become efficient as they greatly expanded. It avoids a premature internal transition from its informal entrepreneurial phase to a more bureaucratic mode of operation.
Challenges
Although the above-mentioned arguments favor the view that BPO increases the flexibility of organizations, management needs to be careful with the implementation of it. Although BPO has many potential advantages there are a few stumbling blocks, which could counter these advantages. Among problems, which arise in practice are: A failure to meet service levels, unclear contractual issues, changing requirements and unforeseen charges. When BPO does not work out as planned the company might well experience the way in which BPO makes a company very dependent on a vendor and therefore very inflexible. Consequently, these challenges need to
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be considered before a company decides to engage in business process outsourcing.
Threats
Unfortunately, several studies reveal the disappointing fact that most outsourcing contracts fail to live up to their expectations. The potential dangers for achieving long term success are loss of internal business process know-how and dependency towards the vendor. There is a need to manage the activities of the vendor, to motivate the vendor to invest knowledge and collaborate in a constructive way. In practice there are many cases known for only one-off gains and additional service charges, basically over the price of knowledge and capability delivered. This trend seems to carry the charateristics of the mistakes made one decade earlier during the booming IT '90's.
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Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO)
Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) is a form of outsourcing, in which knowledge-related and information-related work is carried out by workers in a different company, usually in a different country. Unlike the outsourcing of manufacturing, this typically involves high-value work carried out by highly skilled staff. KPO firms, in addition to providing expertise in the processes themselves, often make many low level business decisions - typically those that are easily undone if they conflict with higherlevel business plans.
Process transparency is a major barrier to using KPO services.[clarify] Many organizations do not track carefully which decisions are made by whom, and rely so much on informal social processes (and "soft skills") that it is unclear how much the use of KPO would disrupt existing operations. However, requirements like Sarbanes-Oxley and radical transparency movements like full cost accounting, shareholder activism and eco-labels and moral purchasing require organizations to be more explicit about when and by whom decisions are made. These trends make it easier for outsourcing noncritical jobs to be considered by qualifying the impact of decisions in
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advance.[clarify] Furthermore, it becomes easier to evaluate and compare success. A fully developed service economy enables KPO by treating all functions as services.[clarify] So do more technical trends such as service oriented architecture, enterprise application integration and telework: it is easier to outsource a job if it is already being performed outside the head office. Organizations adopting ISO 9000 and ISO 19011 should also find it much easier to integrate externally provided KPO into their operations and audit them on a fair basis.
As of 2007, most US organizations were hiring foreign professionals under H-1 visas to do jobs in the USA for several years, after which they would return to their home countries as managers to train and supervise others, continuing to report to their former business units.
Regional advantages and domains of expertise
Due to the availability of large numbers of skilled staff working for lower pay rates than in the developed world, a few countries like India and the Philippines are front runners in providing these services. This type of work demands advanced analysis and communication, so specific higher
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education and language skills are essential. MBAs, PharmacistsPhDs, engineers, doctors, lawyers, writers, ghostwriters, designers, web designers and other specialists with formal credentials tend to be required.
In India as well as the Philippines, KPO is envisaged as having a high potential[citation needed], not only in the Information Technology (IT) or Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) sectors; it could include patent and copyright related services, other legal research functions, business intelligence and analytics, clinical research, publishing and supply chain management, all of which require a large number of small decisions, and the final products of which tend to be relatively easy to evaluate for accuracy or effectiveness.
The maturity of the BPO sector in both countries gives it an obvious lead in KPO, essentially an offshoot of BPO. It is the high-end activity of the BPO industry and as of 2007 was estimated to provide substantial growth over the next few years.[citation needed] More complex fields of work that the Indian KPO industry focuses on include intellectual property or patent research, content development, R&D in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, market research, equity research, data research, database creation, analytical
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services, financial modeling, design and development in automotive and aerospace industries, animation and simulation, medical content and services, remote education and e-learning, publishing and legal support.
Some practitioners argue that one region likely to suffer extreme job loss due to KPO is the USA. Princeton economist Alan Blinder estimates 40 million white-collar jobs in the US alone could move offshore in a decade or two.
Challenges to providers
In addition to the challenges faced by clients, KPO companies themselves have challenges:
High staff turnover, especially where work is not challenging to the employee's skills High cost of training and tendency to lose the most experienced employees to the clients Ensuring the security and confidentiality of information, especially when privacy laws vary from country to country
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Market research
Leaders in the market research industry are slowly seeing the benefits offered by KPO and have begun outsourcing.[citation needed] Comprehensive IT solutions are offered by vendors who provide solutions covering the entire life cycle of a market research project. Smaller firms can also benefit from these solutions as they are cost effective and remain within the budget of smaller organizations.
KPO is claimed to efficiently increase productivity and increase cost savings in the area of market research.[citation needed] Advocates claim that the trend is likely to prove increasingly popular in the global market research industry.
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Recruitment Process Outsourcing Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer outsources or transfers all or part of its recruitment activities to an external service provider.
RPO may involve the outsourcing of all or just part of recruitment functions and process. The external service provider may serve as a virtual recruiting department by providing a complete package of skills, tools, technologies and activities. The RPO service provider is "the" source for inscope recruitment activity.
On the other hand, occasional recruitment support, for example temporary, contingency and executive search services is more analogous to out-tasking, co-sourcing or just sourcing. In this example the service provider is "a" source for certain types of recruitment activity.differentiating between RPO and other types of staffing
The biggest distinction between RPO and other types of staffing is Process. In RPO the service provider assumes ownership of the process,
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while in other types of staffing the service provider is part of a process controlled by the organization buying their services.
History
While temporary, contingency and executive search firms have provided staffing services for many decades, the concept of an employer outsourcing the management and ownership of part or all of their recruiting process wasn't first realized on a consistent basis until the 1970s in Silicon Valley's highly competitive high tech labor market. Fast-growing high tech companies were hard-pressed to locate and hire the technical specialists they required, and so had little choice but to pay large fees to highly specialized external recruiters in order to staff their projects. Over time, companies began to examine how they might reduce the growing expenses of recruitment fees while still hiring hard-to-find technical specialists. Toward this end, companies began to examine the various steps in the recruiting process with an eye toward outsourcing only those portions that they had the greatest difficulty with and that added the greatest value to them. Initial RPO programs typically consisted of companies purchasing lists of potential candidates from RPO vendors. This "search/research" function, as it was
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called, generated names of competitors' employees for a company and served to augment the pool of potential candidates from which that company could hire.
Over time, as business in general embraced the concept of outsourcing more and more, RPO gained favor among Human Resource management: not only did RPO reduce overhead costs from their budgets but it also helped improve the company's competitive advantage in the labor market. As labor markets became more and more competitive, RPO became more of a common solution. It is claimed that a greater impetus for RPO was provided by the shortage of skilled labor created by the dot-com boom and RPO was utilized more commonly to fill the gap. [Citation needed]
The greater use of RPO is also said be influenced by the ubiquitous use of technology to increase productivity. This reliance on technology places a premium on hiring people with specific technical skills. This specificity requires a targeted approach to recruiting, and RPO is a strategy that can satisfy this need.
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There have been fundamental changes in the US labor market that serve to reinforce the use of RPO as well. The labor market has become increasingly dynamic: workers today change employers more often than in previous generations. De-regulated labor markets have also created a shift towards contract and part-time labor and shorter work tenures. These trends increase recruitment activity and may encourage the use of RPO. [Citation needed]
Benefits
RPO's promoters claim that the solution offers improvement in quality, cost, service and speed.
RPO providers claim that economies of scale enable them to offer recruitment processes at lower cost while economies of scope allow them to operate as high-quality, specialists. [Citation needed]. Economies of scale and scope are said to arise from a larger staff of recruiters, databases of candidate resumes, and investment in recruitment tools and networks.
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RPO solutions are also claimed to change fixed investment costs into variable costs that vary with fluctuation in recruitment activity. Companies may pay by transaction rather than by staff member, thus avoiding underutilization or sacking recruitment staff when activity is low.
Problems
If a company failed to define its overall recruitment strategy and hiring objectives, then any recruiting program may fail to meet the company's needs. This is especially true for outsourced programs like RPO. RPO is a tool for executing tactical plans and can only succeed in the context of a well defined corporate strategy.
As with any program, a company must manage its RPO activities. A company must provide initial direction and continued monitoring to assure the desired results. Overall, providing guidance to external activities can present a significant management challenge.
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Outsourcing of company processes may fail or prove a poor organizational fit. Improperly implemented RPO could reduce the effectiveness of recruitment. [Citation needed]
The costs charged for recruitment transactions may total more than the cost of the internal recruitment department.
RPO service providers may fail to provide the quality or volume of staff required by their customers. Placing all recruitment in the hands of a single outside provider may discourage the competition that would arise if multiple recruitment agencies were used.
An RPO solution may not work if the company's existing recruitment processes are performing poorly. An RPO solution may not work if the service provider has inadequate recruitment processes or procedures to work with the client.
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RPO may not resolve difficulties that organizations have hiring staff when the organization is perceived negatively by potential employees. This will instead require improved branding and an adjustment of image.
Organizations with efficient hiring process that are viewed as employers-of-choice by potential staff may stand to gain negligible benefits from RPO.
Recruitment Recruitment refers to the process of sourcing, screening, and selecting people for a job or vacancy within an organization. Though individuals can undertake individual components of the recruitment process, mid- and largesize organizations generally retain professional recruiters
The recruitment industry The recruitment industry has four main types of agencies. Their recruiters aim to channel candidates into the hiring organization’s application process. As a general rule, the agencies are paid by the companies, not the candidates.
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Traditional recruitment agency Also known as employment agencies, recruitment agencies have historically had a physical location. A candidate visits a local branch for a short interview and an assessment before being taken onto the agency’s books. Recruitment Consultants then endeavor to match their pool of candidates to their clients' open positions. Suitable candidates are with potential employers.
Renumeration for the agency's services usually takes one of two forms:
A contingency fee paid when a recommended candidate accepts a job with a client company (typically 20%-30% of the candidate’s starting salary) An advance payment that serves as a retainer
Online recruitment websites Such sites have two main features: job boards and a résumé/Curriculum Vitae (CV) database. Job boards allow member companies to post job vacancies. Alternatively, candidates can upload a
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résumé to be included in searches by member companies. Fees are charged for job postings and access to search resumes.
In recent times the recruitment website has evolved to encompass end to end recruitment. Websites capture candidate details and then pool then in client accessed candidate management interfaces (also online). Key players in this sector provide e-recruitment software and services to organizations of all sizes and within numerous industry sectors, who want to e-enable entirely or partly their recruitment process in order to improve business performance.
The online software provided by those who specialize in online recruitment helps organizations attract, test, recruit, employ and retain quality staff with a minimal amount of administration.
Headhunters Headhunting is third-party recruiters often retained when normal recruitment efforts have failed.
Headhunters are generally more aggressive than in-house recruiters. They may use advanced sales techniques, such as initially posing as clients
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to gather employee contacts, as well as visiting candidate offices. They may also purchase expensive lists of names and job titles. They may prepare a candidate for the interview, help negotiate the salary, and conduct closure to the search.
Headhunters are typically small operations that make high margins on candidate placements (often more than 30% of the candidate’s annual compensation). Due to their higher costs, headhunters are usually employed to fill senior management and executive level roles.
While in-house recruiters tend to attract candidates for specific jobs, headhunters will actively seek them out. To do so, they may network, cultivate relationships with various companies, maintain large databases, purchase company directories or candidate lists, and cold call.
In-house recruitment Larger employers tend to undertake their own in-house recruitment, using their Human Resources department. In addition to coordinating with the agencies mentioned above, in-house recruiters may advertise job vacancies on their own websites, coordinate employee referral schemes,
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and/or focus on campus graduate recruitment. Alternatively a large employer may choose to outsource all or some of their recruitment process (Recruitment process outsourcing).
The Recruitment Process These are the main recruiting stages.
Sourcing Sourcing involves 1) advertising, a common part of the recruiting process, often encompassing multiple media, such as the Internet, general newspapers, job ad newspapers, professional publications, window advertisements, job centers, and campus graduate recruitment programs; and 2) recruiting research, which is the proactive identification of relevant talent who may not respond to job postings and other recruitment advertising methods done in #1. This initial research for so-called passive prospects, also called name-generation, results in a list of prospects who can then be contacted to solicit interest, obtain a resume/CV, and be screened (see below).
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Screening & selection Suitability for a job is typically assessed by looking for skills, e.g. communication, typing, and computer skills. Qualifications may be shown through résumés, job applications, interviews, educational or professional experience, the testimony of references, or in-house testing, such as for software knowledge, typing skills, numeracy, and literacy, through psychological tests or employment testing.
In some countries, employers are legally mandated to provide equal opportunity in hiring.
A British Army etc. recruitment centre in Oxford. On boarding A well-planned introduction helps new employees become fully operational quickly and is often integrated with the recruitment process.
Recruitment in the UK In the UK, recruitment services are provided by Employment Agencies or Employment Businesses, as defined by the Employment Agencies Act 1973. Essentially, Employment Agencies provide employers
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with candidates, which they can employ for a fixed, pre-defined fee. Employment Businesses provide candidates that are employed by the Employment Business, but act for (or are under the control of) a third party; commonly called Temporary Workers or Temps. In the UK, both Recruitment Agencies and Businesses are referred to as Recruitment Agencies, or simply Agencies, regardless of whether they operate as agencies, businesses or both. Many companies that operate in recruitment in the UK act as both Employment Business and Agencies.
Recruitment in Ireland Main article: Recruitment in Ireland The recruitment service industry in Ireland is a flourishing commercial environment built on the strong and constant economic growth Ireland has experienced the last 10-15 years due to the Celtic Tiger, most prominently in Dublin. Specialized recruitment agencies (sometimes known as employment agencies or simply recruiters) across the country offer personnel consulting, specialist corporate recruiting, CV data basing, job-finding and headhunting, and temporary worker management services. These agencies usually work with larger business clients who are seeking qualified employees. There are approximately 600 recruitment agencies in Ireland, with an estimated 300 of
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those based in Dublin alone. Often large, growing businesses in Ireland prefer to outsource their recruitment and job advertising needs to an outside firm, and recruitment agencies offer these key services to these clients, usually in exchange for a percentage-based compensation matched from the new employee’s earned salary. In this way, the client pays the recruitment agency for services rendered – the candidate (new employee) usually does not pay anything for being recruited.
The past several years have shown somewhat of a turnaround for recruitment market dynamics. While it used to be more difficult to obtain business clients and large numbers of available job openings, the growing prevalence of recruitment agencies has led more and more companies to outsource their employment efforts as recruitment has become a very viable and cost-effective business partnership for many firms. Today, recruitment agencies are shifting focus to greater efforts on reaching out to job-seekers, as many agencies are finding no lack of client job opportunities. The task at hand, then, is to attract as many quality job candidates as possible, so as to place them in the multitudes of opportunities being offered by client businesses. Candidates are typically placed on multi-faceted set of criteria:
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personal preference and interests, industry or position experience, education, references, and psychographics
Recruitment in Greece In Greece, recruitment usually happens through specialist newspapers or websites, either by recruitment agencies or interested companies themselves.
Pitfalls of recruitment Candidates can be subject to undue pressure to accept a job or position, such as in expanding the base of a cult.
Differentiating between RPO and other types of staffing
Recruitment as a Service
Confused about RPO? Don’t worry; you’ve got plenty of company. If only providers could tone down their marketing hype to truly define recruitment process outsourcing.
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By Michael Beygelman
Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is an acceptable term for consultants, sourcing advisors, industry analysts, and pundits alike. However, practically speaking, it appears as though the acronym RPO is somewhat less defining to buy-side and sell-side recruitment practitioners.
Even though you’ve probably read dozens of articles on RPO and attended at least as many conferences, ask yourself this question: What is RPO? Then ask 10 of your colleagues the same question. If you are surprised with different definitions, then I am certain that you’ll find this month’s column intriguing.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE TERM
HRO leaders created this acronym because at the time it seemed reasonable: the transfer of management and ownership of internal permanent recruitment operations to a third party on an ongoing basis. However, every imaginable staffing company—temporary, contingent, search, recruitment automation technology vendors, off-shore resume processing vendors, and
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even some job boards—now call themselves RPO firms because it is on the forefront of most strategic HR conversations. So many have reclassified themselves as RPO that today, at the outset of most conversations with clients about RPO, I spend as much as 30 minutes discussing, “how do you define RPO?” and the differences between one service and another. This is troubling and only getting worse.
The real question is this: does the state of the RPO industry today represent what we thought RPO would be? This is a highly debated topic with no right or wrong answer, but the short answer is no. Let me draw a parallel to payroll outsourcing.
Would you consider a customer who performs in-house payroll for 11,000 workers and “outsources” payroll processing and preparation for 900 workers, in four job categories, fewer than 20 weeks a year as someone who outsources payroll processing? If a colleague said she outsources payroll, would the above scenario come to mind? Probably not. This doesn’t happen in a very mature payroll outsourcing market, but in the recruitment outsourcing market, it happens every day.
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When we distill the RPO acronym, it’s no wonder we find ourselves puzzled. We understand recruitment, and by now we hopefully understand outsourcing, but process? The recruitment process has at least four major subprocesses: outreach, source, recruit, and hire. Diving even deeper, each major subprocess has at least four to five subprocesses.
To continue with the payroll processing analogy, can you imagine a company outsourcing to a third party the preparation of data while still printing its own checks and wanting the service provider to prepare and send out quarterly tax returns but the company retains processing and mailing of W-2s? Analogously, this very thing happens in recruitment outsourcing every day.
The state of RPO today would politely be categorized as co-sourcing, or just sourcing, let alone outsourcing. The number of real recruitment process outsourcing programs is actually very small and hard to spot because everyone is calling everything RPO.
For example, engaging three service providers on a contingent fee basis to staff two financial shared-services centers with a total of 242 people
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is not recruitment outsourcing; this is called a project, with a definitive start, end, and a deliverable.
Some recent buyer sentiment surveys rank recruitment as an HR function high on the list of likely functions to outsource. Conversely, of all the outsourced HR services, it has the lowest customer satisfaction—less than 40 percent. Certainly, buyers point their fingers at service providers and vice versa, but what’s really at the heart of this dilemma is an immature business. For customers to be more satisfied, they need to better understand what they are buying. Unfortunately, in this new global economy, service providers aren’t going to change their guerrilla marketing tactics so the onus is on the buyer to figure out what they are buying.
RPO is not a bad term; it’s just that more accurate ways of talking about buying recruitment are available. For example, recruitment as a service can be invoked when we refer to buying management and fulfillment of certain recruitment functions. We can say recruitment products or solutions when we are looking at buying 30 candidates on a fee-per-hire basis or an applicant tracking system bundled with candidate assessment,
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screening, and EEO reporting capabilities. We can then reserve recruitment outsourcing (dropping the process portion) for when we are talking about true transfer of management and ownership on an ongoing basis.
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BUSINESS CONCEPT OF RPO
TYPES OF TERMINOLOGIES
Terminologies
As recruiters every recruiter need to know the following terminologies as we get to frequently work with these terms/concepts on a daily basis:
The terms can be categorized into the following types: ? Types of Contracts ? INS (Visa Status) ? Employment Types
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Types Of Contracts
Definition: - Contract is a binding agreement between two or more parties for the doing or not doing of certain things.
The parties involved in these contracts are: ? Internal Revenue Service (IRS). A federal agency responsible for enforcing US tax laws and collecting taxes. ? Employer. A person or firm that employs workers ? Employee. A person in the service of another person or firm.
The types of contracts are: ? W2. ? 1099. ? Corporation to corporation i.e. Corp to Corp.
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W2 Contract
Ta x
IRS
Employer
Gross – tax Employee
Under this type of a contract the Employer pays taxes to the IRS on behalf of the Employee and pays the Employee the balance amount.
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CORP to CORP
INFORMATION
IRS
Gross
Ta x
Employee / Corp 1
Employer / Corp 2 Gross -Tax Employee
The Employer1 contracts with Employer2 who to render a service. This service is rendered by an Employee of Employer2. Employer1 pays the amount to Employer2 for the services rendered and informs the IRS about the same. Employer2 charges a fee out of the amount received, deducts the taxes and pays the remaining amount to the Employee.
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1099
INFORMATION
IRS
Ta x
Employee / Corp 1
Gross Employee
The Employer pays amount to the Employee without deducting the taxes. However, informs the IRS about the amount paid to the Employee. It is the onus of the Employee to pay the taxes to the IRS.z
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INS - VISA STATUS - SAMPLE
Def. of INS. The federal agency responsible for administering immigration procedures and assigning citizenship status.
What is a Visa? ? Def. A visa allows a foreign citizen to travel to a U.S. port-of entry and request permission from the U.S. immigration officer to enter the United States. ? It does not guarantee entry into the U.S. ? When a migrant deplane, he has to follow signs for non-citizen entry. At that location, a Department of Homeland Security official will interview you and verify all of your paperwork. ? Under the US-VISIT Program of the Department of Homeland Security, for most persons arriving in the U.S., there will be a finger scan of the two index fingers and a photo will be taken.
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? Once admitted, you will receive an immigration stamp and proceed to baggage claim and customs. Various types of statuses
OPT (Optional Practical Training). ? Optional Practical Training is the opportunity to apply knowledge gained in the classroom ? to a practical work experience off campus. ? Optional practical training is authorized by the USCIS. ? This authorization can take up to 90 days to obtain. ? The maximum amount of time granted to work in F-1 practical training status is 12 months.
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Graduate Working visa (H1B).
? The H1B visa enables US employers to hire foreign professionals for a specified period of time. ? The H1B program allows workers in specialty occupations to work in the US for up to a total of six (6) years. ? During the term of the H1B visa the employee can also apply for permanent residency. This is called "Dual Intent", and is a privilege some other U.S. visas do not enjoy. ? The length of time that a worker can have an H1B visa is usually an initial period of up to three years. The initial H1B visa can then be extended twice for up to a combined total of six years. ? Other regulatory provisions permit; ? The employer to request a period of less than three years, ? The employee to be employed on a part-time basis ? The employee to work for more than one US Employer simultaneously.
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Employment Authorization Document (EAD)
? It is a document from the USCIS to authorize an alien to work in the U.S. for a period of time, usually one year. It is also called a work permit. ? It looks as a card, with the alien's name, alien's photo, and expiration date. ? With the EAD, an alien may legally work in the United States for any employer. ? Renewal EAD: One should apply for a renewal EAD six months before their original EAD expires ? If a consultant is an employment based AOS applicant, he/she must continue working for their sponsoring employer to retain their eligibility.
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? AoS. Adjustment of Status is the final stage of Green Card. After the completion of this process, the applicant becomes a lawful permanent resident of the US. ? One may also accept additional employment with other companies, or even open their own small business. This additional employment must be supplemental to the employment used to qualify themselves for adjustment of status. ? A applicant can opt either: 1. File form I-485 - Wherein, the applicant can file for adjustment of status using form I485 for him/herself and family members while remain in US; OR 2. Consular Processing - In this case, applicant can apply for adjustment of status at the US Consular office in their home country. (Please see our separate section on Consular Processing for further details)
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Green Card (GC).
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? A Green Card is a Permanent Visa to USA which gives you the status of permanent resident and legal rights to work in United States. ? GC allows you the freedom to leave and return to the U.S., to seek employment, to study according to your wish. ? It gives you the same rights as an American citizen, and you can also retain your citizenship in your native country. ? With permanent resident status (green card), you can expand your business in America without any problems. ? GC doesn't mean citizenship. You might apply for citizenship after holding GC status for a certain period of time. ? GC is normally for 10 years and needs to be revalidated after that limit. ? Some Jobs need security clearance which only GC holders and US Citizens have. ? A GC holder can apply for US Citizenship after 5 years of being a permanent resident without leaving the US for trips of 6 months or longer.
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US CITIZEN
US Citizenship ? US citizenship can be acquired by birth or by the process of naturalization. The process of an immigrant becoming a US citizen is termed as ‘naturalization’. If you are not born in the US, you have to naturalize to become a US citizen. ? US Citizens are entitled to certain tax exemptions, job benefits, scholarships and grants at educational institutions, flexibility in traveling to other countries, and the right to vote, thereby voicing your choice in the government’s policies. ? Once you become a citizen, your children, 18 or younger automatically become US citizens. ? US Citizens are eligible for certain jobs in the high-security level departments/firms wherein even Green Card Holders are not permitted. ? US Citizens have a right to vote.
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TN permit
TN-1 Visa ? Canadians & Mexicans looking for work permits should consider the TN1 visa. ? "TN" stands for "Treaty/NAFTA”. ? This classification was created by the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement ("NAFTA"). ? This can be easily acquired. ? Unlike the H-1B visa category, the TN-1 has no annual limits per fiscal year. ? There is no set "cap" on the amount of time a Canadian citizen may remain in the United States in TN-1 status. ? TN-1 status may be approved for no more than a one-year period, though TN-1 status may (theoretically) be indefinitely renewed after initial entry.
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? The TN1 is granted for a specific employer. If needed for more than one employer, multiple TN1 applications need to be made.
Employment Types
Definition of Employment. Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee.
An employer can choose to contract with the employees with the following nature: ? Full Time. ? Part-time. ? Contract. ? Contract to Hire. ? Permanent ? Tele Commute
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Fulltime. ? Definition Employed for or involving a standard number of hours of working time. ? Full time is often considered careers. ? It has other benefits like Health Insurance, PF, Medical Reimbursements etc. ? Employers hire people on a full time for their needs which are continuous and related/contributing to their business.
Part Time. ? Definition Employed for less than the customary or standard time. ? Does not have any benefits. ? It is undertaken generally as an activity to get more money. ? Employers hire people on a part time for their temporary needs and for such other needs which are not a critical activity.
Contract. ? Definition An agreement between an employer and employee for a fixed duration to render the services. ? The duration of the need with the employer is estimated to be for a stipulated time and hence the employee’s services would end after that duration.
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Contract to Hire. ? Definition Under this type of a contract, the employer hires the services of employee initially for a fixed duration and based on the performance and availability would be hired on a full-time permanent basis. ? This type of a contract throws open a lot of scope for employees to perform and get absorbed.
Permanent. ? Definition This type of an employment exists or remains for an indefinitely long time i.e. an employee if hired without a cap on the duration or the tenure. ? This gets a lot of benefits for the employees like Leave policies, Bonuses, Medical allowances etc.
Tele Commute. ? Definition To work at home using a computer connected to the network of one's employer. ? In this form of work arrangement, employees enjoy flexibility in work place and time (within certain limits). ? The reasons why an employer allows this form of an arrangement, but not limited to, are:
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? The employee might belong to the location where the delivery is required. For Eg. The employee is hired as a Sales Manager, belonging to NY, and the location he is required to sell into is NY but the client has HQ in CA. It only becomes logical for the employee to work from his home office and not relocate to CA. ? There are certain tasks that can be delivered out of home and needs lesser supervision. For Eg. A web designer can work out of his home office and travel to employer’s location for meetings, approvals and feedbacks.
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Time Zones
•
Definition Any of the 24 longitudinal divisions of the earth's surface in which a standard time is kept, the primary division being that bisected by the Greenwich meridian.
•
Each zone is 15° of longitude in width, with local variations, and observes a clock time one hour earlier than the zone immediately to the east.
•
Before the adoption of time zones, people used local solar time (originally apparent solar time, as with a sundial; and, later, mean solar time).
It takes the earth 24 hours to make one complete rotation, the earth turns 360 degrees. Dividing 360 degrees by 24 hours gives you 15 degrees. Therefore, the earth is divided into 24 time zones, each of which is approximately 15 degrees of longitude wide.
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World and the History of Time Zones
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History ? Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was established in 1675, when the Royal Observatory was built, as an aid to determine longitude at sea by mariners. ? Timekeeping on the American railroads in the mid nineteenth century was somewhat confused. ? Each railroad used its own standard time, usually based on the local time of its headquarters or most important terminus, and the railroad's train schedules were published using its own time. ? The confusion for travelers making a long journey involving several changes of train can be imagined. ? The first time zone in the world was established by British railways on December 1, 1847 — with GMT hand-carried on chronometers. ? Even though 98% of Great Britain's public clocks were using GMT by 1855, it was not made Britain's legal time until August 2, 1880. ? In 1884, most nations agreed to standardize time and that Greenwich would be where all time is measured from.
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Standard time zones ? Earlier, time zones based their time on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, also called UT1), the mean solar time at longitude 0° (the Prime Meridian). ? But as a mean solar time, GMT is defined by the rotation of the Earth, which is not constant in rate. ? So, the rate of atomic clocks was annually changed or steered to closely match GMT. ? But on January 1, 1972 it became fixed, using predefined leap seconds instead of rate changes. This new time system is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). ? Leap seconds are inserted to keep UTC within 0.9 seconds of UT1. In this way, local times continue to correspond approximately to mean solar time. ? With the implementation of UTC, nations began to use it in the definition of their time zones instead of GMT.
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EMAIL FORMAT:-
Subject (Please Note
: :
QA/Tester (16597) in Bothell, WA Mails which have words like “Immediate Opportunity”
OR “Opportunity” OR “Job Opportunity” in the subject has a high risk of being diverted to the Junk folder of the mailbox.)
Hello,
We have an immediate opening for you as QA / Tester (16597).
Location Duration
: :
Bothell, WA 3 Months :
Required skill
• Facilitation skills • Microsoft Windows platforms • SQL
Qualifications: • Previous telecom (preferably wireless) experience desired.
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• Ability to work on multiple projects simultaneously mid to strong level in UNIX OS and SQL a must. • Knowledge of Telecommunications Network and Fusion works platform a plus. • Strong analytical and communication skills • Ability to write test cases and test plans Must be self starter and able to work with little supervision.
Responsibilities: • Tester supports the delivery of high-quality information systems by leading the effort to plan, execute, and document results of tests of new or revised system capabilities. • This includes primary responsibility for determining whether new or revised system capabilities have been adequately tested for release to users in production. • Determine level of testing required to validate new or revised system capabilities. • Create test plans to accomplish required testing. • Execute test plans.
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• Report accurate testing status. • Create test summary reports. • Continuously improve test models, test data, and test processes based on lessons learned.
Kindly mail us your interest with an updated resume as immediately as possible so that we can discuss this opportunity in greater detail. This is a hot requirement and is generating a lot of interests so please do hurry...
To enable me to speed up things please could you mention in the body of your mail your: 1. 2. 3. INS Status - whether you are US Citizen or Green Card Holder? Availability - When you can start working on a new assignment. Are you in touch with anybody for this position at MDI (Management
Decisions Inc)? 4. Telephone number and a convenient time for a phone interview with our
recruiting manager. 5. Your current and expected compensation and the nature of contract
preferred.
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6.
Are you willing to relocate, if required for this position? Alternatively, your
willingness to travel (whether 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%)? 7. If you are currently working, the nature of the contract and your reasons for
opting out? 8. Comfort levels (on a scale of 1Least to 10High) with each of the specifications
mentioned in the requirement.
Alternatively, if you know someone who could benefit from such an opportunity, please feel free to share this information with them as we are always on the lookout for good people like you.
Looking forward to work with you soon.
Vinod Kumar CES CRM Group (Associate of MDI) | www.cesltd.com 630-206-0933 x 1311 [email protected]
MDI is a professional consulting and staffing firm with three divisions - IT Consulting, Finance and Accounting (F&A), and Medical Staffing. Founded in 1988, MDI has
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recorded 18 consecutive years of profitable growth. MDI is located in Atlanta, GA (HQ); Birmingham, AL; Columbus, GA; Dallas, TX; Greenville, SC; and Phoenix, AZ.
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Calling Script
1. Hi! Am I speaking with <Name>? This is <Recruiter Name>, calling from CES. 2. I’ve called you with regards to a requirement with our client, FISERV, for “Sr. Java Developer”. 3. Would this be an ideal time for me to discuss this requirement? ? If NO, would you suggest a convenient time and number for me to call you back to discuss the same? 4. Are you comfortable with the requirement? Will you be interested? ? If NOT INTERESTED, Could you help me understand your areas of expertise which would help me revert back to you with a more appropriate opportunity? ? Also could you kindly forward this to any of your acquaintance who makes a fit and would be available? 5. If INTERESTED, Could you help me understand your profile which would help me in projecting it better with my client? 6. How have you used the technologies required for the requirement with the client? 7. Which industry does the client belong to for whom you are developing / developed the application / system for? 8. Do you have any certifications? If YES, which year did he take his certification? 9. What are the issues, you have faced in any of your projects and how you have tackled them? If he is comfortable discussing. 10. What is the volume of transactions to the application / system you are developing?
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11. Which are the Work Groups you were involved with for the application / system you are developing or had developed? 12. Are you willing to work for a XX months contract? 13. What would be the hourly pay rate/ Compensation that you are looking for? 14. Are you comfortable with the location mentioned? 15. What is your INS Status and preferred Type of Contract? (This is for the people into US Recruitments). 16. How long do you think you would take to join my client from the date of offer? 17. How would you rate yourself on a scale of 1Least to 10High on the requirement and the technologies mentioned? 18. Have you been contacted by any other recruiter for this requirement or client? ? If YES, Have you been submitted by them for this requirement or would you advice us to present your profile to the client? 19. Do you think we could present your profile to the client? 20. Thank you, <Name>; I shall call you back at the earliest. It was nice Speaking to you, have a Great Time
You are required to sum up the following information before closing the call: • • • • Job Title Client (If allowed to discuss) Duration of Contract INS Status and Type of Contract
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• • • • • •
Pay Rate consented by the consultant Availability Location Comfort on the technology and the requirement His immediate contact number and email Id. Affirmation that we are allowed to submit his profile to the client discussed and that no other recruiter has submitted.
•
If possible, the next step to follow the telephonic we had with him or atleast a tentative time for us to get back to him.
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BIOBLIOGRAPHY
Website:
• • • • Wikipedia – RPO Google Search Engine www.cesltd.com www.sapbrainsonline.com
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doc_729755732.doc
A “recovery point objective” or “RPO”, is defined by business continuity planning. It is the maximum tolerable period in which data might be lost from an IT service due to a major incident.[1] The RPO gives systems designers a limit to work to. For instance, if the RPO is set to 4 hours, then in practice, offsite mirrored backups must be continuously maintained- a daily offsite backup on tape will not suffice.
STUDY ON RPO IN INDIA AT CUSTOMER EMPOWERING SERVICES PVT. LTD
INDEX Table of Contents:
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Abstract Objective of the study Introduction Company Profile Limitations of the Study Evolution of RPO in India ? Business process outsourcing (BPO) ? Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) ? Recruitment Process Outsourcing 7. BUSINESS CONCEPT OF RPO ? Types Of Contracts ? INS ? Employment Types 22 30 35 55 56 60 69
Page No.
i ii 2 19 21
? Time Zones 8. 9. E-Mail Formate Calling Script
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ABSTRACT
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer outsources or transfers all or part of its recruitment activities to an external service provider. India is a booming market for RPO, which followed the trend in outsourcing in the foot steps of BPO, KPO and LPO ventures from US and Europe based companies.
This project is undertaken to study the functioning of RPO and its business specifically in international market. The project focuses primarily on US IT market.
i
Objectives of the Study
1. To study the business model of RPO. 2. To know the recruitment process in overseas market. 3. To study the outsourced staffing done by RPOs
ii
AT
Customer Empowering Services
INTRODUCTION OUT SOURCING Outsourcing is subcontracting a process, such as product design or manufacturing, to a third-party company. Outsourcing became part of the business lexicon during the 1980s. The decision to outsource is often made in the interest of lowering firm costs, redirecting or conserving energy directed at the competencies of a particular business, or to make more efficient use of labor, capital, technology and resources Overview Outsourcing involves the transfer of the management and/or day-today execution of an entire business function to an external service provider. The client organization and the supplier enter into a contractual agreement that defines the transferred services. Under the agreement the supplier acquires the means of production in the form of a transfer of people, assets and other resources from the client. The client agrees to procure the services from the supplier for the term of the contract. Business segments typically outsourced include information technology, human resources, facilities and real estate management, and accounting. Many companies also outsource
2
customer support and call center functions like telemarketing, customer services, market research, manufacturing and engineering. Outsourcing and offshoring are used interchangeably in public discourse despite important technical differences. Outsourcing involves contracting with a supplier, which may or may not involve some degree of offshoring. Offshoring is the transfer of an organizational function to another country, regardless of whether the work is outsourced or stays within the same corporation. With increasing globalization of outsourcing companies, the distinction between outsourcing and offshoring will become less clear over time. This is evident in the increasing presence of Indian outsourcing companies in the US and UK. The globalization of outsourcing operating models has resulted in new terms such as nearshoring and rightshoring that reflect the changing mix of locations. This is seen in the opening of offices and operations centers by Indian companies in the U.S. and UK. Multisourcing refers to large (predominantly IT) outsourcing agreements. Multisourcing is a framework to enable different parts of the client business to be sourced from different suppliers. This requires a governance model that communicates strategy, clearly defines responsibility and has end-to-end integration.
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Process of outsourcing Deciding to outsource The decision to outsource is taken at a strategic level and normally requires board approval. Outsourcing is the divestiture of a business function involving the transfer of people and the sale of assets to the supplier. The process begins with the client identifying what is to be outsourced and building a business case to justify the decision. Only once a high level business case has been established for the scope of services will a search begin to choose an outsourcing partner. Supplier proposals A Request for Proposal (RFP) is issued to the shortlist suppliers requesting a proposal and a price. Supplier competition A competition is held where the client marks and scores the supplier proposals. This may involve a number of face-to-face meetings to clarify the client requirements and the supplier response. The suppliers will be qualified out until only a few remain. This is known as down select in the industry. It is normal to go into the due diligence stage with two suppliers to maintain the competition. Following due diligence the suppliers submit a “best and final offer” (BAFO) for the client to make the final down select decision to
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one supplier. It is not unusual for two suppliers to go into competitive negotiations. Negotiations The negotiations take the original RFP, the supplier proposals, BAFO submissions and convert these into the contractual agreement between the client and the supplier. This stage finalizes the documentation and the final pricing structure. Contract finalization At the heart of every outsourcing deal is a contractual agreement that defines how the client and the supplier will work together. This is a legally binding document and is core to the governance of the relationship. There are three significant dates that each party signs up to the contract signature date, the effective date when the contract terms become active and a service commencement date when the supplier will take over the services. Transition The transition will begin from the effective date and normally run until four months after service commencement date. This is the process for the staff transfer and the take-on of services.
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Transformation The Transformation is the execution of a set of projects to implement the Service Level Agreement (SLA), to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) or to implement new Services. Emphasis is on ‘standardisation’ and ‘centralisation’. Ongoing service delivery This is the execution of the agreement and lasts for the term of the contract. Termination or renewal Near the end of the contract term a decision will be made to terminate or renew the contract. Termination may involve taking back services (insourcing) or the transfer of services to another supplier. Reasons for outsourcing Organizations that outsource are seeking to realize benefits or address the following issues: • Cost savings:The lowering of the overall cost of the service to the business. This will involve reducing the scope, defining quality levels, repricing, re-negotiation, cost re-structuring. Access to lower cost
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economies through offshoring called “labor arbitrage” generated by the wage gap between industrialized and developing nations. • Cost restructuring:Operating leverage is a measure that compares fixed costs to variable costs. Outsourcing changes the balance of this ratio by offering a move from fixed to variable cost and also by making variable costs more predictable. • Improve quality:Achieve a step change in quality through contracting out the service with a new Service Level Agreement. • Knowledge:Access to intellectual property and wider experience and knowledge. • Contract:Services will be provided to a legally binding contract with financial penalties and legal redress. This is not the case with internal services.
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• Operational expertise:Access to operational best practice that would be too difficult or time consuming to develop in-house. • Staffing issues:Access to a larger talent pool and a sustainable source of skills. • Capacity management:An improved method of capacity management of services and technology where the risk in providing the excess capacity is borne by the supplier. • Catalyst for change:An organization can use an outsourcing agreement as a catalyst for major step change that can not be achieved alone. The outsourcer becomes a Change agent in the process. • Reduce time to market:The acceleration of the development or production of a product through the additional capability brought by the supplier. • Commodification:The trend of standardizing business processes, IT Services and application services enabling businesses to intelligently buy at the
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right price. Allows a wide range of businesses access to services previously only available to large corporations. • Risk management:An approach to risk management for some types of risks is to partner with an outsourcer who is better able to provide the mitigation. • Time zone:A sequential task can be done during normal day shift in different time zones – to make it seamlessly available 24x7. Same/similar can be done on a longer term between earth’s hemispheres of summer/winter. • Customer Pressure:Customers may see benefits in dealing with your company, but are not happy with the performance of certain elements of the business, which they may not see a solution to except through outsourcing. Criticisms of outsourcing Public opinion There is a strong public opinion regarding outsourcing (especially when combined with offshoring) that outsourcing damages a local labor market. Outsourcing is the transfer of the delivery of services which affects
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both jobs and individuals. It is difficult to dispute that outsourcing has a detrimental effect on individuals who face job disruption and employment insecurity; however, its supporters believe that outsourcing should bring down prices, providing greater economic benefit to all. There are legal protections in the European Union regulations called the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment). Labor laws in the United States are not as protective as those in the European Union. A study has attempted to show that public controversies about outsourcing in the U.S. have much more to do with class and ethnic tensions within the U.S. itself, than with actual impacts of outsourcing. Against shareholder views For a publicly listed company it is the responsibility of the board to run the business for the shareholders. This means taking into consideration the views of the shareholders. Shareholders may be interested in return on investment and/or social responsibility. The board may decide that outsourcing is an appropriate strategy for the business. Shareholders have a responsibility to make their views known to the board of directors if they are against outsourcing.
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Failure to realize business value The main business criticism of outsourcing is that it fails to realize the business value that the outsourcer promised the client. Language skills In the area of call centers end-user-experience is deemed to be of lower quality when a service is outsourced. This is exacerbated when outsourcing is combined with off-shoring to regions where the first language and culture are different. The questionable quality is particularly evident when call centers that service the public are outsourced and offshored. There are a number of the public who find the linguistics features such as accents, word use and phraseology different which may make call center agents difficult to understand. The visual clues that are present in face-toface encounters are missing from the call center interactions and this also may lead to misunderstandings and difficulties.
Social responsibility Some argue that the outsourcing of jobs (particularly off-shore) exploits the lower paid workers. A contrary view is that more people are employed and benefit from paid work.
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Quality of service Quality of service is measured through a service level agreement (SLA) in the outsourcing contract. In poorly defined contracts there is no measure of quality or SLA defined. Even when an SLA exists it may not be to the same level as previously enjoyed. This may be due to the process of implementing proper objective measurement and reporting which is being done for the first time. It may also be lower quality through design to match the lower price. There are a number of stakeholders who are affected and there is no single view of quality. The CEO may view the lower quality acceptable to meet the business needs at the right price. The retained management team may view quality as slipping compared to what they previously achieved. The end consumer of the service may also receive a change in service that is within agreed SLAs but is still perceived as inadequate. The supplier may view quality in purely meeting the defined SLAs regardless of perception or ability to do better. Quality in terms of end-user-experience is best measured through customer satisfaction questionnaires which are professionally designed to capture an unbiased view of quality. Surveys can be one of research. This
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allows quality to be tracked over time and also for corrective action to be identified and taken. Staff turnover The staff turnover of employee who originally transferred to the outsourcer is a concern for many companies. Turnover is higher under an outsourcer and key company skills may be lost with retention outside of the control of the company. In outsourcing offshore there is an issue of staff turnover in the outsourcer companies call centers. It is quite normal for such companies to replace its entire workforce each year in a call center. This inhibits the buildup of customer knowledge and keeps quality at a low level. Company knowledge Outsourcing could lead to communication problems with transferred employees. For example before transfer staff have access to broadcast company e-mail informing them of new products, procedures etc. Once in the outsourcing organization the same access may not be available. Also to reduce costs, some outsource employees may not have access to e-mail, but any information which is new is delivered in team meetings.
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Qualifications of outsourcers The outsourcer may replace staff with less qualified people or with people with different non-equivalent qualifications. In the engineering discipline there has been a debate about the number of engineers being produced by the major economies of the United States, India and China. The argument centers around the definition of an engineering graduate and also disputed numbers. The closest comparable numbers of annual gradates of four-year degrees are United States (137,437) India (112,000) and China (351,537). Work, labour, and economy Net labour movements Productivity Offshore outsourcing for the purpose of saving cost can often have a negative influence on the real productivity of a company. Rather than investing in technology to improve productivity, companies gain non-real productivity by hiring fewer people locally and outsourcing work to less productive facilities offshore that appear to be more productive simply because the workers are paid less. Sometimes, this can lead to strange contradictions where workers in a third world country using hand tools can appear to be more productive than a U.S. worker using advanced computer
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controlled machine tools, simply because their salary appears to be less in terms of U.S. dollars. In contrast, increases in real productivity are the result of more productive tools or methods of operating that make it possible for a worker to do more work. Non-real productivity gains are the result of shifting work to lower paid workers, often without regards to real productivity. The net result of choosing non-real over real productivity gain is that the company falls behind and obsoletes itself overtime rather than making real investments in productivity. Standpoint of labor From the standpoint of labor within countries on the negative end of outsourcing this may represent a new threat, contributing to rampant worker insecurity, and reflective of the general process of globalization (see Krugman, Paul (2006). “Feeling No Pain.” New York Times, March 6, 2006). While the “outsourcing” process may provide benefits to less developed countries or global society as a whole, in some form and to some degree – include rising wages or increasing standards of living – these benefits are not secure. Further, the term outsourcing is also used to describe a process by which an internal department, equipment as well as personnel, is sold to a service provider, who may retain the workforce on worse
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conditions or discharge them in the short term. The affected workers thus often feel they are being “sold down the river.” The U.S. Outsourcing became a popular political issue in the United States during the 2004 U.S. presidential election. The political debate centered on outsourcing’s consequences for the domestic U.S. workforce. Democratic U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry criticized U.S. firms that outsource jobs abroad or that incorporate overseas in tax havens to avoid paying their fair share of U.S. taxes during his 2004 campaign, calling such firms “Benedict Arnold corporations”. Criticism of outsourcing, from the perspective of U.S. citizens, by-and-large, revolves around the costs associated with transferring control of the labor process to an external entity in another country. A Zogby International poll conducted in August 2004 found that 71% of American voters believed that “outsourcing jobs overseas” hurt the economy while another 62% believed that the U.S. government should impose some legislative action against companies that transfer domestic jobs overseas, possibly in the form of increased taxes on companies that outsource. One given rationale is the extremely high corporate income tax rate in the U.S. relative to other OECD nations, and the peculiar practice of taxing revenues earned outside of U.S. jurisdiction, a
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very uncommon practice. It is argued that lowering the corporate income tax and ending the double-taxation of foreign-derived revenue (taxed once in the nation where the revenue was raised, and once from the U.S.) will alleviate corporate outsourcing and make the U.S. more attractive to foreign companies. Sarbanes-Oxley has also been cited as a factor for corporate flight from U.S. jurisdiction. Policy solutions to outsourcing are also criticized. Security Before outsourcing an organization is responsible for the actions of all their staff and liable for their actions. When these same people are transferred to an outsourcer they may not change desk but their legal status has changed. They no-longer are directly employed or responsible to the organization. This causes legal, security and compliance issues that need to be addressed through the contract between the client and the suppliers. This is one of the most complex areas of outsourcing and requires a specialist third party adviser. Fraud Fraud is a specific security issue that is criminal activity whether it is by employees or the supplier staff. It can be argued that fraud is more likely when outsourcers are involved. In April 2005, a high-profile case involving
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the theft of $350,000 from four Citibank customers occurred when call center workers, acquired the passwords to customer accounts and transferred the money to their own accounts opened under fictitious names. Citibank did not find out about the problem until the American customers noticed discrepancies with their accounts and notified the bank.
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COMPANY PROFILE
CES Ltd is a Business Consulting and Business Process Outsourcing services provider, registered in India, with subsidiary offices in Chicago, U.S. CES Ltd also has operational offices in Princeton, NJ, and Stamford, CT. CES Business Consulting practice provides comprehensive, full life-cycle business strategies and IT-enabled initiatives, with deep domain expertise in Oracle® and Linux®.
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CES Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) leverages available technologies and in-house solutions to automate process tasks, while offering instantaneous ramp-up without compromising on service level metrics mandated by the clients. CES BPO offerings entail full life cycle customer support for • • Internet-based retailers and multi-channel retailers Data management (collection and programming) services for market research companies and • Recruitment Process support for Global IT Services companies In the last three years of business, we have grown to over fifty members’ team strength in the U.S., with another 400 people in India, with established operations and sales offices at key locations worldwide to enable true Global-to-Local engagement experience.
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Limitations of the Study • The study is limited only to the market of US • The information is limited as these are confidential. • The study is limited to only Information Technology which includes only Software Application Programming (SAP)
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EVOLUTION OF RPO IN INDIA Business process outsourcing (BPO)
Business process outsourcing (BPO) contains the transmission of processes along with the associated operational activities and responsibilities, to a third party with at least a guaranteed equal service level and where the client contains a firm grip over the (activities of the) vendor for mutual long term success. BPO is positively related to the search for more efficient organizational designs: cost reduction, productivity growth and innovative capabilities. Hence, a source for strategic advantage.
Traditionally, BPO is undertaken by manufacturing firms. For instance Coca Cola, where almost the entire supply chain is outsourced and the company is essentially becoming a marketing organization. However, BPO is nowadays rapidly conquering the service oriented firms as well. A well-known example is provided by the Bank of America, who outsourced their entire HR function to Exult, one of the leading Human Resources BPO vendors.
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BPO is often divided into two categories: back office outsourcing, which includes internal business functions such as billing or purchasing, and front office outsourcing, which includes customer-related services such as marketing or tech support. The endless opportunities IT provides, stimulates (cross-border) BPO activities. BPO that is contracted outside a company's own country is sometimes called offshore outsourcing. BPO that is contracted to a company's neighboring country is sometimes called nearshore outsourcing, and BPO that is contracted within the company's own country is sometimes called onshore outsourcing. The most common examples of BPO are call centers, human resources, accounting and payroll outsourcing.
Use of a BPO as opposed to an application service provider (ASP) usually also means that a certain amount of risk is transferred to the company that is running the process elements on behalf of the outsourcer. BPO includes the software, the process management, and the people to operate the service, while a typical ASP model includes only the provision of access to functionalities and features provided or 'served up' through the use of software, usually via web browser to the customer. BPO is a part of the outsourcing industry. It is dependent on information technology, hence it
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is also referred to as information technology enabled services or ITES. Knowledge process outsourcing and legal process outsourcing are some of the subsets of business process outsourcing.
ITES
Information technology enabled services, or ITES, is a form of outsourced service which has emerged due to involvement of IT in various fields such as banking and finance, telecommunications, insurance, etc. Some of the examples of ITES are medical transcription, back-office accounting, insurance claim, credit card processing and many more.
Firms usually from developed countries outsource such services to countries like Egypt, India, Bangladesh, China, Romania and Philippines in order to gain from large talent pool and low labor cost.
Industry size
India has revenues of 6.4 billion USD[4] from offshore BPO and 36billion USD from IT and total BPO. India thus has some 5-6% share of
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the total BPO Industry, but a commanding 63% share of the offshore component. This 63% is a drop from the 70% offshore share that India enjoyed last year, despite the industry growing 38% in India last year, other locations like Eastern Europe, Philippines, Egypt and South Africa have emerged to take a share of the market. China is also trying to grow from a very small base in this industry. However, while the BPO industry is expected to continue to grow in India, its market share of the offshore piece is expected to decline.
The top five Indian BPO exporters for 2006-2007 according to NASSCOM are Genpact, WNS Global Services, Transworks Information Services, IBM-daksh, and TCS BPO.
The global BPO Industry is estimated to be worth 120–150 billion dollars, of this the offshore BPO is estimated to be some US$11.4 Billion. [citation needed]
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Flexibility in practice
One of the most important advantage of BPO is the way in which it helps to increase a company’s flexibility. However, several sources have different ways in which they perceive organizational flexibility. Therefore business process outsourcing enhances the flexibility of an organization in different ways.
• Most services provided by BPO vendors are offered on a fee-forservice basis. This helps a company becoming more flexible by transforming fixed into variable costs. A variable cost structure helps a company responding to changes in required capacity and does not requisite a company in investing in assets and hereby making the company more flexible. Outsourcing of for instance a fraction of the workforce provides firm flexibility and reconfiguring resource deployments and reduce response times to major environmental changes.
• Another way in which BPO contributes to a company’s flexibility is that a company is able to focus on it’s core competencies, without being burdened by the demands of bureaucratic dictate. Key employees are
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herewith released from performing non-core or administrative processes and can invest more time and energy in building the firm’s core businesses. The key in this lies in knowing, which of the main value drivers to focus on – customer intimacy, product leadership, or operate excellence. This is exemplified by for instance the case of Dell. Focusing on one of these drivers instead of more helps a company create a competitive edge. Herewith the company becomes more responsive and is able to react faster on changes in a an organization’s environment.
• A third way in which BPO increases organizational flexibility is by increasing the speed of business processes. Using techniques such as linear programming is a way to reduce cycle time and inventory levels, which reduces a company’s slack. Supply chain management with the effective use of supply chain partners and business process outsourcing increases the speed of several business processes, such as the throughput in the case of a manufacturing company.
• Finally, flexibility is seen as a stage in the organizational life cycle. For instance in the case of Nortel, which used to be a very rigid and bureaucratic organization, BPO helped to transform the company from a
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bureaucratic organization into a very agile organization by means of BPO. A company can hereby help maintaining ambitious growth goals, which do not fit with regular incumbent strategies. BPO therefore allows firms to retain their entrepreneurial speed and agility, which they would otherwise sacrifice in order to become efficient as they greatly expanded. It avoids a premature internal transition from its informal entrepreneurial phase to a more bureaucratic mode of operation.
Challenges
Although the above-mentioned arguments favor the view that BPO increases the flexibility of organizations, management needs to be careful with the implementation of it. Although BPO has many potential advantages there are a few stumbling blocks, which could counter these advantages. Among problems, which arise in practice are: A failure to meet service levels, unclear contractual issues, changing requirements and unforeseen charges. When BPO does not work out as planned the company might well experience the way in which BPO makes a company very dependent on a vendor and therefore very inflexible. Consequently, these challenges need to
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be considered before a company decides to engage in business process outsourcing.
Threats
Unfortunately, several studies reveal the disappointing fact that most outsourcing contracts fail to live up to their expectations. The potential dangers for achieving long term success are loss of internal business process know-how and dependency towards the vendor. There is a need to manage the activities of the vendor, to motivate the vendor to invest knowledge and collaborate in a constructive way. In practice there are many cases known for only one-off gains and additional service charges, basically over the price of knowledge and capability delivered. This trend seems to carry the charateristics of the mistakes made one decade earlier during the booming IT '90's.
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Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO)
Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) is a form of outsourcing, in which knowledge-related and information-related work is carried out by workers in a different company, usually in a different country. Unlike the outsourcing of manufacturing, this typically involves high-value work carried out by highly skilled staff. KPO firms, in addition to providing expertise in the processes themselves, often make many low level business decisions - typically those that are easily undone if they conflict with higherlevel business plans.
Process transparency is a major barrier to using KPO services.[clarify] Many organizations do not track carefully which decisions are made by whom, and rely so much on informal social processes (and "soft skills") that it is unclear how much the use of KPO would disrupt existing operations. However, requirements like Sarbanes-Oxley and radical transparency movements like full cost accounting, shareholder activism and eco-labels and moral purchasing require organizations to be more explicit about when and by whom decisions are made. These trends make it easier for outsourcing noncritical jobs to be considered by qualifying the impact of decisions in
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advance.[clarify] Furthermore, it becomes easier to evaluate and compare success. A fully developed service economy enables KPO by treating all functions as services.[clarify] So do more technical trends such as service oriented architecture, enterprise application integration and telework: it is easier to outsource a job if it is already being performed outside the head office. Organizations adopting ISO 9000 and ISO 19011 should also find it much easier to integrate externally provided KPO into their operations and audit them on a fair basis.
As of 2007, most US organizations were hiring foreign professionals under H-1 visas to do jobs in the USA for several years, after which they would return to their home countries as managers to train and supervise others, continuing to report to their former business units.
Regional advantages and domains of expertise
Due to the availability of large numbers of skilled staff working for lower pay rates than in the developed world, a few countries like India and the Philippines are front runners in providing these services. This type of work demands advanced analysis and communication, so specific higher
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education and language skills are essential. MBAs, PharmacistsPhDs, engineers, doctors, lawyers, writers, ghostwriters, designers, web designers and other specialists with formal credentials tend to be required.
In India as well as the Philippines, KPO is envisaged as having a high potential[citation needed], not only in the Information Technology (IT) or Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) sectors; it could include patent and copyright related services, other legal research functions, business intelligence and analytics, clinical research, publishing and supply chain management, all of which require a large number of small decisions, and the final products of which tend to be relatively easy to evaluate for accuracy or effectiveness.
The maturity of the BPO sector in both countries gives it an obvious lead in KPO, essentially an offshoot of BPO. It is the high-end activity of the BPO industry and as of 2007 was estimated to provide substantial growth over the next few years.[citation needed] More complex fields of work that the Indian KPO industry focuses on include intellectual property or patent research, content development, R&D in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, market research, equity research, data research, database creation, analytical
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services, financial modeling, design and development in automotive and aerospace industries, animation and simulation, medical content and services, remote education and e-learning, publishing and legal support.
Some practitioners argue that one region likely to suffer extreme job loss due to KPO is the USA. Princeton economist Alan Blinder estimates 40 million white-collar jobs in the US alone could move offshore in a decade or two.
Challenges to providers
In addition to the challenges faced by clients, KPO companies themselves have challenges:
High staff turnover, especially where work is not challenging to the employee's skills High cost of training and tendency to lose the most experienced employees to the clients Ensuring the security and confidentiality of information, especially when privacy laws vary from country to country
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Market research
Leaders in the market research industry are slowly seeing the benefits offered by KPO and have begun outsourcing.[citation needed] Comprehensive IT solutions are offered by vendors who provide solutions covering the entire life cycle of a market research project. Smaller firms can also benefit from these solutions as they are cost effective and remain within the budget of smaller organizations.
KPO is claimed to efficiently increase productivity and increase cost savings in the area of market research.[citation needed] Advocates claim that the trend is likely to prove increasingly popular in the global market research industry.
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Recruitment Process Outsourcing Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer outsources or transfers all or part of its recruitment activities to an external service provider.
RPO may involve the outsourcing of all or just part of recruitment functions and process. The external service provider may serve as a virtual recruiting department by providing a complete package of skills, tools, technologies and activities. The RPO service provider is "the" source for inscope recruitment activity.
On the other hand, occasional recruitment support, for example temporary, contingency and executive search services is more analogous to out-tasking, co-sourcing or just sourcing. In this example the service provider is "a" source for certain types of recruitment activity.differentiating between RPO and other types of staffing
The biggest distinction between RPO and other types of staffing is Process. In RPO the service provider assumes ownership of the process,
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while in other types of staffing the service provider is part of a process controlled by the organization buying their services.
History
While temporary, contingency and executive search firms have provided staffing services for many decades, the concept of an employer outsourcing the management and ownership of part or all of their recruiting process wasn't first realized on a consistent basis until the 1970s in Silicon Valley's highly competitive high tech labor market. Fast-growing high tech companies were hard-pressed to locate and hire the technical specialists they required, and so had little choice but to pay large fees to highly specialized external recruiters in order to staff their projects. Over time, companies began to examine how they might reduce the growing expenses of recruitment fees while still hiring hard-to-find technical specialists. Toward this end, companies began to examine the various steps in the recruiting process with an eye toward outsourcing only those portions that they had the greatest difficulty with and that added the greatest value to them. Initial RPO programs typically consisted of companies purchasing lists of potential candidates from RPO vendors. This "search/research" function, as it was
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called, generated names of competitors' employees for a company and served to augment the pool of potential candidates from which that company could hire.
Over time, as business in general embraced the concept of outsourcing more and more, RPO gained favor among Human Resource management: not only did RPO reduce overhead costs from their budgets but it also helped improve the company's competitive advantage in the labor market. As labor markets became more and more competitive, RPO became more of a common solution. It is claimed that a greater impetus for RPO was provided by the shortage of skilled labor created by the dot-com boom and RPO was utilized more commonly to fill the gap. [Citation needed]
The greater use of RPO is also said be influenced by the ubiquitous use of technology to increase productivity. This reliance on technology places a premium on hiring people with specific technical skills. This specificity requires a targeted approach to recruiting, and RPO is a strategy that can satisfy this need.
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There have been fundamental changes in the US labor market that serve to reinforce the use of RPO as well. The labor market has become increasingly dynamic: workers today change employers more often than in previous generations. De-regulated labor markets have also created a shift towards contract and part-time labor and shorter work tenures. These trends increase recruitment activity and may encourage the use of RPO. [Citation needed]
Benefits
RPO's promoters claim that the solution offers improvement in quality, cost, service and speed.
RPO providers claim that economies of scale enable them to offer recruitment processes at lower cost while economies of scope allow them to operate as high-quality, specialists. [Citation needed]. Economies of scale and scope are said to arise from a larger staff of recruiters, databases of candidate resumes, and investment in recruitment tools and networks.
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RPO solutions are also claimed to change fixed investment costs into variable costs that vary with fluctuation in recruitment activity. Companies may pay by transaction rather than by staff member, thus avoiding underutilization or sacking recruitment staff when activity is low.
Problems
If a company failed to define its overall recruitment strategy and hiring objectives, then any recruiting program may fail to meet the company's needs. This is especially true for outsourced programs like RPO. RPO is a tool for executing tactical plans and can only succeed in the context of a well defined corporate strategy.
As with any program, a company must manage its RPO activities. A company must provide initial direction and continued monitoring to assure the desired results. Overall, providing guidance to external activities can present a significant management challenge.
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Outsourcing of company processes may fail or prove a poor organizational fit. Improperly implemented RPO could reduce the effectiveness of recruitment. [Citation needed]
The costs charged for recruitment transactions may total more than the cost of the internal recruitment department.
RPO service providers may fail to provide the quality or volume of staff required by their customers. Placing all recruitment in the hands of a single outside provider may discourage the competition that would arise if multiple recruitment agencies were used.
An RPO solution may not work if the company's existing recruitment processes are performing poorly. An RPO solution may not work if the service provider has inadequate recruitment processes or procedures to work with the client.
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RPO may not resolve difficulties that organizations have hiring staff when the organization is perceived negatively by potential employees. This will instead require improved branding and an adjustment of image.
Organizations with efficient hiring process that are viewed as employers-of-choice by potential staff may stand to gain negligible benefits from RPO.
Recruitment Recruitment refers to the process of sourcing, screening, and selecting people for a job or vacancy within an organization. Though individuals can undertake individual components of the recruitment process, mid- and largesize organizations generally retain professional recruiters
The recruitment industry The recruitment industry has four main types of agencies. Their recruiters aim to channel candidates into the hiring organization’s application process. As a general rule, the agencies are paid by the companies, not the candidates.
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Traditional recruitment agency Also known as employment agencies, recruitment agencies have historically had a physical location. A candidate visits a local branch for a short interview and an assessment before being taken onto the agency’s books. Recruitment Consultants then endeavor to match their pool of candidates to their clients' open positions. Suitable candidates are with potential employers.
Renumeration for the agency's services usually takes one of two forms:
A contingency fee paid when a recommended candidate accepts a job with a client company (typically 20%-30% of the candidate’s starting salary) An advance payment that serves as a retainer
Online recruitment websites Such sites have two main features: job boards and a résumé/Curriculum Vitae (CV) database. Job boards allow member companies to post job vacancies. Alternatively, candidates can upload a
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résumé to be included in searches by member companies. Fees are charged for job postings and access to search resumes.
In recent times the recruitment website has evolved to encompass end to end recruitment. Websites capture candidate details and then pool then in client accessed candidate management interfaces (also online). Key players in this sector provide e-recruitment software and services to organizations of all sizes and within numerous industry sectors, who want to e-enable entirely or partly their recruitment process in order to improve business performance.
The online software provided by those who specialize in online recruitment helps organizations attract, test, recruit, employ and retain quality staff with a minimal amount of administration.
Headhunters Headhunting is third-party recruiters often retained when normal recruitment efforts have failed.
Headhunters are generally more aggressive than in-house recruiters. They may use advanced sales techniques, such as initially posing as clients
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to gather employee contacts, as well as visiting candidate offices. They may also purchase expensive lists of names and job titles. They may prepare a candidate for the interview, help negotiate the salary, and conduct closure to the search.
Headhunters are typically small operations that make high margins on candidate placements (often more than 30% of the candidate’s annual compensation). Due to their higher costs, headhunters are usually employed to fill senior management and executive level roles.
While in-house recruiters tend to attract candidates for specific jobs, headhunters will actively seek them out. To do so, they may network, cultivate relationships with various companies, maintain large databases, purchase company directories or candidate lists, and cold call.
In-house recruitment Larger employers tend to undertake their own in-house recruitment, using their Human Resources department. In addition to coordinating with the agencies mentioned above, in-house recruiters may advertise job vacancies on their own websites, coordinate employee referral schemes,
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and/or focus on campus graduate recruitment. Alternatively a large employer may choose to outsource all or some of their recruitment process (Recruitment process outsourcing).
The Recruitment Process These are the main recruiting stages.
Sourcing Sourcing involves 1) advertising, a common part of the recruiting process, often encompassing multiple media, such as the Internet, general newspapers, job ad newspapers, professional publications, window advertisements, job centers, and campus graduate recruitment programs; and 2) recruiting research, which is the proactive identification of relevant talent who may not respond to job postings and other recruitment advertising methods done in #1. This initial research for so-called passive prospects, also called name-generation, results in a list of prospects who can then be contacted to solicit interest, obtain a resume/CV, and be screened (see below).
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Screening & selection Suitability for a job is typically assessed by looking for skills, e.g. communication, typing, and computer skills. Qualifications may be shown through résumés, job applications, interviews, educational or professional experience, the testimony of references, or in-house testing, such as for software knowledge, typing skills, numeracy, and literacy, through psychological tests or employment testing.
In some countries, employers are legally mandated to provide equal opportunity in hiring.
A British Army etc. recruitment centre in Oxford. On boarding A well-planned introduction helps new employees become fully operational quickly and is often integrated with the recruitment process.
Recruitment in the UK In the UK, recruitment services are provided by Employment Agencies or Employment Businesses, as defined by the Employment Agencies Act 1973. Essentially, Employment Agencies provide employers
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with candidates, which they can employ for a fixed, pre-defined fee. Employment Businesses provide candidates that are employed by the Employment Business, but act for (or are under the control of) a third party; commonly called Temporary Workers or Temps. In the UK, both Recruitment Agencies and Businesses are referred to as Recruitment Agencies, or simply Agencies, regardless of whether they operate as agencies, businesses or both. Many companies that operate in recruitment in the UK act as both Employment Business and Agencies.
Recruitment in Ireland Main article: Recruitment in Ireland The recruitment service industry in Ireland is a flourishing commercial environment built on the strong and constant economic growth Ireland has experienced the last 10-15 years due to the Celtic Tiger, most prominently in Dublin. Specialized recruitment agencies (sometimes known as employment agencies or simply recruiters) across the country offer personnel consulting, specialist corporate recruiting, CV data basing, job-finding and headhunting, and temporary worker management services. These agencies usually work with larger business clients who are seeking qualified employees. There are approximately 600 recruitment agencies in Ireland, with an estimated 300 of
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those based in Dublin alone. Often large, growing businesses in Ireland prefer to outsource their recruitment and job advertising needs to an outside firm, and recruitment agencies offer these key services to these clients, usually in exchange for a percentage-based compensation matched from the new employee’s earned salary. In this way, the client pays the recruitment agency for services rendered – the candidate (new employee) usually does not pay anything for being recruited.
The past several years have shown somewhat of a turnaround for recruitment market dynamics. While it used to be more difficult to obtain business clients and large numbers of available job openings, the growing prevalence of recruitment agencies has led more and more companies to outsource their employment efforts as recruitment has become a very viable and cost-effective business partnership for many firms. Today, recruitment agencies are shifting focus to greater efforts on reaching out to job-seekers, as many agencies are finding no lack of client job opportunities. The task at hand, then, is to attract as many quality job candidates as possible, so as to place them in the multitudes of opportunities being offered by client businesses. Candidates are typically placed on multi-faceted set of criteria:
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personal preference and interests, industry or position experience, education, references, and psychographics
Recruitment in Greece In Greece, recruitment usually happens through specialist newspapers or websites, either by recruitment agencies or interested companies themselves.
Pitfalls of recruitment Candidates can be subject to undue pressure to accept a job or position, such as in expanding the base of a cult.
Differentiating between RPO and other types of staffing
Recruitment as a Service
Confused about RPO? Don’t worry; you’ve got plenty of company. If only providers could tone down their marketing hype to truly define recruitment process outsourcing.
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By Michael Beygelman
Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is an acceptable term for consultants, sourcing advisors, industry analysts, and pundits alike. However, practically speaking, it appears as though the acronym RPO is somewhat less defining to buy-side and sell-side recruitment practitioners.
Even though you’ve probably read dozens of articles on RPO and attended at least as many conferences, ask yourself this question: What is RPO? Then ask 10 of your colleagues the same question. If you are surprised with different definitions, then I am certain that you’ll find this month’s column intriguing.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE TERM
HRO leaders created this acronym because at the time it seemed reasonable: the transfer of management and ownership of internal permanent recruitment operations to a third party on an ongoing basis. However, every imaginable staffing company—temporary, contingent, search, recruitment automation technology vendors, off-shore resume processing vendors, and
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even some job boards—now call themselves RPO firms because it is on the forefront of most strategic HR conversations. So many have reclassified themselves as RPO that today, at the outset of most conversations with clients about RPO, I spend as much as 30 minutes discussing, “how do you define RPO?” and the differences between one service and another. This is troubling and only getting worse.
The real question is this: does the state of the RPO industry today represent what we thought RPO would be? This is a highly debated topic with no right or wrong answer, but the short answer is no. Let me draw a parallel to payroll outsourcing.
Would you consider a customer who performs in-house payroll for 11,000 workers and “outsources” payroll processing and preparation for 900 workers, in four job categories, fewer than 20 weeks a year as someone who outsources payroll processing? If a colleague said she outsources payroll, would the above scenario come to mind? Probably not. This doesn’t happen in a very mature payroll outsourcing market, but in the recruitment outsourcing market, it happens every day.
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When we distill the RPO acronym, it’s no wonder we find ourselves puzzled. We understand recruitment, and by now we hopefully understand outsourcing, but process? The recruitment process has at least four major subprocesses: outreach, source, recruit, and hire. Diving even deeper, each major subprocess has at least four to five subprocesses.
To continue with the payroll processing analogy, can you imagine a company outsourcing to a third party the preparation of data while still printing its own checks and wanting the service provider to prepare and send out quarterly tax returns but the company retains processing and mailing of W-2s? Analogously, this very thing happens in recruitment outsourcing every day.
The state of RPO today would politely be categorized as co-sourcing, or just sourcing, let alone outsourcing. The number of real recruitment process outsourcing programs is actually very small and hard to spot because everyone is calling everything RPO.
For example, engaging three service providers on a contingent fee basis to staff two financial shared-services centers with a total of 242 people
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is not recruitment outsourcing; this is called a project, with a definitive start, end, and a deliverable.
Some recent buyer sentiment surveys rank recruitment as an HR function high on the list of likely functions to outsource. Conversely, of all the outsourced HR services, it has the lowest customer satisfaction—less than 40 percent. Certainly, buyers point their fingers at service providers and vice versa, but what’s really at the heart of this dilemma is an immature business. For customers to be more satisfied, they need to better understand what they are buying. Unfortunately, in this new global economy, service providers aren’t going to change their guerrilla marketing tactics so the onus is on the buyer to figure out what they are buying.
RPO is not a bad term; it’s just that more accurate ways of talking about buying recruitment are available. For example, recruitment as a service can be invoked when we refer to buying management and fulfillment of certain recruitment functions. We can say recruitment products or solutions when we are looking at buying 30 candidates on a fee-per-hire basis or an applicant tracking system bundled with candidate assessment,
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screening, and EEO reporting capabilities. We can then reserve recruitment outsourcing (dropping the process portion) for when we are talking about true transfer of management and ownership on an ongoing basis.
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BUSINESS CONCEPT OF RPO
TYPES OF TERMINOLOGIES
Terminologies
As recruiters every recruiter need to know the following terminologies as we get to frequently work with these terms/concepts on a daily basis:
The terms can be categorized into the following types: ? Types of Contracts ? INS (Visa Status) ? Employment Types
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Types Of Contracts
Definition: - Contract is a binding agreement between two or more parties for the doing or not doing of certain things.
The parties involved in these contracts are: ? Internal Revenue Service (IRS). A federal agency responsible for enforcing US tax laws and collecting taxes. ? Employer. A person or firm that employs workers ? Employee. A person in the service of another person or firm.
The types of contracts are: ? W2. ? 1099. ? Corporation to corporation i.e. Corp to Corp.
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W2 Contract
Ta x
IRS
Employer
Gross – tax Employee
Under this type of a contract the Employer pays taxes to the IRS on behalf of the Employee and pays the Employee the balance amount.
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CORP to CORP
INFORMATION
IRS
Gross
Ta x
Employee / Corp 1
Employer / Corp 2 Gross -Tax Employee
The Employer1 contracts with Employer2 who to render a service. This service is rendered by an Employee of Employer2. Employer1 pays the amount to Employer2 for the services rendered and informs the IRS about the same. Employer2 charges a fee out of the amount received, deducts the taxes and pays the remaining amount to the Employee.
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1099
INFORMATION
IRS
Ta x
Employee / Corp 1
Gross Employee
The Employer pays amount to the Employee without deducting the taxes. However, informs the IRS about the amount paid to the Employee. It is the onus of the Employee to pay the taxes to the IRS.z
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INS - VISA STATUS - SAMPLE
Def. of INS. The federal agency responsible for administering immigration procedures and assigning citizenship status.
What is a Visa? ? Def. A visa allows a foreign citizen to travel to a U.S. port-of entry and request permission from the U.S. immigration officer to enter the United States. ? It does not guarantee entry into the U.S. ? When a migrant deplane, he has to follow signs for non-citizen entry. At that location, a Department of Homeland Security official will interview you and verify all of your paperwork. ? Under the US-VISIT Program of the Department of Homeland Security, for most persons arriving in the U.S., there will be a finger scan of the two index fingers and a photo will be taken.
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? Once admitted, you will receive an immigration stamp and proceed to baggage claim and customs. Various types of statuses
OPT (Optional Practical Training). ? Optional Practical Training is the opportunity to apply knowledge gained in the classroom ? to a practical work experience off campus. ? Optional practical training is authorized by the USCIS. ? This authorization can take up to 90 days to obtain. ? The maximum amount of time granted to work in F-1 practical training status is 12 months.
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Graduate Working visa (H1B).
? The H1B visa enables US employers to hire foreign professionals for a specified period of time. ? The H1B program allows workers in specialty occupations to work in the US for up to a total of six (6) years. ? During the term of the H1B visa the employee can also apply for permanent residency. This is called "Dual Intent", and is a privilege some other U.S. visas do not enjoy. ? The length of time that a worker can have an H1B visa is usually an initial period of up to three years. The initial H1B visa can then be extended twice for up to a combined total of six years. ? Other regulatory provisions permit; ? The employer to request a period of less than three years, ? The employee to be employed on a part-time basis ? The employee to work for more than one US Employer simultaneously.
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Employment Authorization Document (EAD)
? It is a document from the USCIS to authorize an alien to work in the U.S. for a period of time, usually one year. It is also called a work permit. ? It looks as a card, with the alien's name, alien's photo, and expiration date. ? With the EAD, an alien may legally work in the United States for any employer. ? Renewal EAD: One should apply for a renewal EAD six months before their original EAD expires ? If a consultant is an employment based AOS applicant, he/she must continue working for their sponsoring employer to retain their eligibility.
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? AoS. Adjustment of Status is the final stage of Green Card. After the completion of this process, the applicant becomes a lawful permanent resident of the US. ? One may also accept additional employment with other companies, or even open their own small business. This additional employment must be supplemental to the employment used to qualify themselves for adjustment of status. ? A applicant can opt either: 1. File form I-485 - Wherein, the applicant can file for adjustment of status using form I485 for him/herself and family members while remain in US; OR 2. Consular Processing - In this case, applicant can apply for adjustment of status at the US Consular office in their home country. (Please see our separate section on Consular Processing for further details)
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Green Card (GC).
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? A Green Card is a Permanent Visa to USA which gives you the status of permanent resident and legal rights to work in United States. ? GC allows you the freedom to leave and return to the U.S., to seek employment, to study according to your wish. ? It gives you the same rights as an American citizen, and you can also retain your citizenship in your native country. ? With permanent resident status (green card), you can expand your business in America without any problems. ? GC doesn't mean citizenship. You might apply for citizenship after holding GC status for a certain period of time. ? GC is normally for 10 years and needs to be revalidated after that limit. ? Some Jobs need security clearance which only GC holders and US Citizens have. ? A GC holder can apply for US Citizenship after 5 years of being a permanent resident without leaving the US for trips of 6 months or longer.
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US CITIZEN
US Citizenship ? US citizenship can be acquired by birth or by the process of naturalization. The process of an immigrant becoming a US citizen is termed as ‘naturalization’. If you are not born in the US, you have to naturalize to become a US citizen. ? US Citizens are entitled to certain tax exemptions, job benefits, scholarships and grants at educational institutions, flexibility in traveling to other countries, and the right to vote, thereby voicing your choice in the government’s policies. ? Once you become a citizen, your children, 18 or younger automatically become US citizens. ? US Citizens are eligible for certain jobs in the high-security level departments/firms wherein even Green Card Holders are not permitted. ? US Citizens have a right to vote.
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TN permit
TN-1 Visa ? Canadians & Mexicans looking for work permits should consider the TN1 visa. ? "TN" stands for "Treaty/NAFTA”. ? This classification was created by the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement ("NAFTA"). ? This can be easily acquired. ? Unlike the H-1B visa category, the TN-1 has no annual limits per fiscal year. ? There is no set "cap" on the amount of time a Canadian citizen may remain in the United States in TN-1 status. ? TN-1 status may be approved for no more than a one-year period, though TN-1 status may (theoretically) be indefinitely renewed after initial entry.
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? The TN1 is granted for a specific employer. If needed for more than one employer, multiple TN1 applications need to be made.
Employment Types
Definition of Employment. Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee.
An employer can choose to contract with the employees with the following nature: ? Full Time. ? Part-time. ? Contract. ? Contract to Hire. ? Permanent ? Tele Commute
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Fulltime. ? Definition Employed for or involving a standard number of hours of working time. ? Full time is often considered careers. ? It has other benefits like Health Insurance, PF, Medical Reimbursements etc. ? Employers hire people on a full time for their needs which are continuous and related/contributing to their business.
Part Time. ? Definition Employed for less than the customary or standard time. ? Does not have any benefits. ? It is undertaken generally as an activity to get more money. ? Employers hire people on a part time for their temporary needs and for such other needs which are not a critical activity.
Contract. ? Definition An agreement between an employer and employee for a fixed duration to render the services. ? The duration of the need with the employer is estimated to be for a stipulated time and hence the employee’s services would end after that duration.
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Contract to Hire. ? Definition Under this type of a contract, the employer hires the services of employee initially for a fixed duration and based on the performance and availability would be hired on a full-time permanent basis. ? This type of a contract throws open a lot of scope for employees to perform and get absorbed.
Permanent. ? Definition This type of an employment exists or remains for an indefinitely long time i.e. an employee if hired without a cap on the duration or the tenure. ? This gets a lot of benefits for the employees like Leave policies, Bonuses, Medical allowances etc.
Tele Commute. ? Definition To work at home using a computer connected to the network of one's employer. ? In this form of work arrangement, employees enjoy flexibility in work place and time (within certain limits). ? The reasons why an employer allows this form of an arrangement, but not limited to, are:
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? The employee might belong to the location where the delivery is required. For Eg. The employee is hired as a Sales Manager, belonging to NY, and the location he is required to sell into is NY but the client has HQ in CA. It only becomes logical for the employee to work from his home office and not relocate to CA. ? There are certain tasks that can be delivered out of home and needs lesser supervision. For Eg. A web designer can work out of his home office and travel to employer’s location for meetings, approvals and feedbacks.
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Time Zones
•
Definition Any of the 24 longitudinal divisions of the earth's surface in which a standard time is kept, the primary division being that bisected by the Greenwich meridian.
•
Each zone is 15° of longitude in width, with local variations, and observes a clock time one hour earlier than the zone immediately to the east.
•
Before the adoption of time zones, people used local solar time (originally apparent solar time, as with a sundial; and, later, mean solar time).
It takes the earth 24 hours to make one complete rotation, the earth turns 360 degrees. Dividing 360 degrees by 24 hours gives you 15 degrees. Therefore, the earth is divided into 24 time zones, each of which is approximately 15 degrees of longitude wide.
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World and the History of Time Zones
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History ? Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was established in 1675, when the Royal Observatory was built, as an aid to determine longitude at sea by mariners. ? Timekeeping on the American railroads in the mid nineteenth century was somewhat confused. ? Each railroad used its own standard time, usually based on the local time of its headquarters or most important terminus, and the railroad's train schedules were published using its own time. ? The confusion for travelers making a long journey involving several changes of train can be imagined. ? The first time zone in the world was established by British railways on December 1, 1847 — with GMT hand-carried on chronometers. ? Even though 98% of Great Britain's public clocks were using GMT by 1855, it was not made Britain's legal time until August 2, 1880. ? In 1884, most nations agreed to standardize time and that Greenwich would be where all time is measured from.
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Standard time zones ? Earlier, time zones based their time on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, also called UT1), the mean solar time at longitude 0° (the Prime Meridian). ? But as a mean solar time, GMT is defined by the rotation of the Earth, which is not constant in rate. ? So, the rate of atomic clocks was annually changed or steered to closely match GMT. ? But on January 1, 1972 it became fixed, using predefined leap seconds instead of rate changes. This new time system is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). ? Leap seconds are inserted to keep UTC within 0.9 seconds of UT1. In this way, local times continue to correspond approximately to mean solar time. ? With the implementation of UTC, nations began to use it in the definition of their time zones instead of GMT.
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EMAIL FORMAT:-
Subject (Please Note
: :
QA/Tester (16597) in Bothell, WA Mails which have words like “Immediate Opportunity”
OR “Opportunity” OR “Job Opportunity” in the subject has a high risk of being diverted to the Junk folder of the mailbox.)
Hello,
We have an immediate opening for you as QA / Tester (16597).
Location Duration
: :
Bothell, WA 3 Months :
Required skill
• Facilitation skills • Microsoft Windows platforms • SQL
Qualifications: • Previous telecom (preferably wireless) experience desired.
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• Ability to work on multiple projects simultaneously mid to strong level in UNIX OS and SQL a must. • Knowledge of Telecommunications Network and Fusion works platform a plus. • Strong analytical and communication skills • Ability to write test cases and test plans Must be self starter and able to work with little supervision.
Responsibilities: • Tester supports the delivery of high-quality information systems by leading the effort to plan, execute, and document results of tests of new or revised system capabilities. • This includes primary responsibility for determining whether new or revised system capabilities have been adequately tested for release to users in production. • Determine level of testing required to validate new or revised system capabilities. • Create test plans to accomplish required testing. • Execute test plans.
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• Report accurate testing status. • Create test summary reports. • Continuously improve test models, test data, and test processes based on lessons learned.
Kindly mail us your interest with an updated resume as immediately as possible so that we can discuss this opportunity in greater detail. This is a hot requirement and is generating a lot of interests so please do hurry...
To enable me to speed up things please could you mention in the body of your mail your: 1. 2. 3. INS Status - whether you are US Citizen or Green Card Holder? Availability - When you can start working on a new assignment. Are you in touch with anybody for this position at MDI (Management
Decisions Inc)? 4. Telephone number and a convenient time for a phone interview with our
recruiting manager. 5. Your current and expected compensation and the nature of contract
preferred.
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6.
Are you willing to relocate, if required for this position? Alternatively, your
willingness to travel (whether 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%)? 7. If you are currently working, the nature of the contract and your reasons for
opting out? 8. Comfort levels (on a scale of 1Least to 10High) with each of the specifications
mentioned in the requirement.
Alternatively, if you know someone who could benefit from such an opportunity, please feel free to share this information with them as we are always on the lookout for good people like you.
Looking forward to work with you soon.
Vinod Kumar CES CRM Group (Associate of MDI) | www.cesltd.com 630-206-0933 x 1311 [email protected]
MDI is a professional consulting and staffing firm with three divisions - IT Consulting, Finance and Accounting (F&A), and Medical Staffing. Founded in 1988, MDI has
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recorded 18 consecutive years of profitable growth. MDI is located in Atlanta, GA (HQ); Birmingham, AL; Columbus, GA; Dallas, TX; Greenville, SC; and Phoenix, AZ.
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Calling Script
1. Hi! Am I speaking with <Name>? This is <Recruiter Name>, calling from CES. 2. I’ve called you with regards to a requirement with our client, FISERV, for “Sr. Java Developer”. 3. Would this be an ideal time for me to discuss this requirement? ? If NO, would you suggest a convenient time and number for me to call you back to discuss the same? 4. Are you comfortable with the requirement? Will you be interested? ? If NOT INTERESTED, Could you help me understand your areas of expertise which would help me revert back to you with a more appropriate opportunity? ? Also could you kindly forward this to any of your acquaintance who makes a fit and would be available? 5. If INTERESTED, Could you help me understand your profile which would help me in projecting it better with my client? 6. How have you used the technologies required for the requirement with the client? 7. Which industry does the client belong to for whom you are developing / developed the application / system for? 8. Do you have any certifications? If YES, which year did he take his certification? 9. What are the issues, you have faced in any of your projects and how you have tackled them? If he is comfortable discussing. 10. What is the volume of transactions to the application / system you are developing?
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11. Which are the Work Groups you were involved with for the application / system you are developing or had developed? 12. Are you willing to work for a XX months contract? 13. What would be the hourly pay rate/ Compensation that you are looking for? 14. Are you comfortable with the location mentioned? 15. What is your INS Status and preferred Type of Contract? (This is for the people into US Recruitments). 16. How long do you think you would take to join my client from the date of offer? 17. How would you rate yourself on a scale of 1Least to 10High on the requirement and the technologies mentioned? 18. Have you been contacted by any other recruiter for this requirement or client? ? If YES, Have you been submitted by them for this requirement or would you advice us to present your profile to the client? 19. Do you think we could present your profile to the client? 20. Thank you, <Name>; I shall call you back at the earliest. It was nice Speaking to you, have a Great Time
You are required to sum up the following information before closing the call: • • • • Job Title Client (If allowed to discuss) Duration of Contract INS Status and Type of Contract
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• • • • • •
Pay Rate consented by the consultant Availability Location Comfort on the technology and the requirement His immediate contact number and email Id. Affirmation that we are allowed to submit his profile to the client discussed and that no other recruiter has submitted.
•
If possible, the next step to follow the telephonic we had with him or atleast a tentative time for us to get back to him.
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BIOBLIOGRAPHY
Website:
• • • • Wikipedia – RPO Google Search Engine www.cesltd.com www.sapbrainsonline.com
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doc_729755732.doc