Source: sify.com
Bangalore: After streamlining its internal recruitment process, Bangalore-based IT consulting firm MindTree Ltd plans to add consulting in recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) to its existing service offerings.
“Although we have implemented RPO at MindTree for just about a year now and we are still in a pilot phase, we are confident that we have enough expertise to offer this as a niche consulting service to clients,” says Sanjay Shelvankar, Vice-President, Talent Acquisition, MindTree Ltd.
Though IT companies routinely advocate business process management, technology adoption and outsourcing to their clients, they lag behind in adopting the same internally, especially in the recruitment process, according to him.
MindTree’s Talent Acquisition division has designed and put in place an RPO that is scalable and can overcome the inefficiencies of the current recruiting system. The model also increases accountability towards results, reduce the cost per hire and effort per hire, says Shelvankar.
In 2007-08, for instance, MindTree hired 1,300 laterals, but had 60,000 people showing interest to join the company with over 165 vendors sending resumes for the jobs. With the industry’s track record of 15-18 per cent hit ratio, the IT company’s recruitment division had to grapple with risks such as wrong hires, delayed hires, no-shows and the associated costs with these.
MindTree now has an RPO vendor on premise working on contracts that are risk-reward types with payments tied to outcomes. “In fact, our cost per hire has now reduced from Rs 57,000 to Rs 41,000 after the RPO implementation,” he says.
With this experience, MindTree intends to offer consulting in the area for the IT industry and has identified a couple of ‘competent RPO providers’. Shelvankar says the company would initially tap MNCs with captive centres in India for the consulting business.
According to industry estimates, the current RPO market is around Rs 10,000 crore in India with HR companies offering RPO as one of their services. | 
