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Workforce Transition: The Talent Solutions Paradigm Shift

May 8, 2018

I’m fortunate, like many of you reading this to have lived through a period of incredible development and change in the world at large. At 43 (only just!), I’m pleased to say that I still love new experiences, visiting new places, and looking at how I can do things better in both my home life and at work. This is probably a good thing because the pace of change and development has never been more prevalent and shows no signs of slowing down.

Whether it’s how we engage with work, where we choose to do our work from, the technology we use or anything else for that matter – there is an evolution happening that we either embrace or, even better, help to shape. The alternative is to choose that things are ‘good enough’ and stick with status quo. The latter, however, is choosing not to stay where we are because when we stop evolving we regress. Few things in life are like a fine wine and improve when you do nothing to change them.


Time Changes the Way We Live
The thing with change is that the ease of adopting something new relies heavily on your starting point. Take the internet, and in particular how it has transformed communication. If you were born before 1980, in all likelihood your ways of communicating are offline. Like many in this group, you use email and Facebook, possibly Twitter. The reality is though that you are an online tourist.

Anyone born after 1990 has only ever known an online world, making them internet natives. Natives tend to find changes in technology easier to embrace because it’s what they have always known and, as a result, they use dozens of different channels for connecting and switch between them with fluidity.

Time Changes Recruitment
The same theory applies to the world of recruitment. Talk with a hiring manager who hasn’t changed jobs in 15 years and their default method of hiring is how they were hired themselves. Typically through a recruitment agency, possibly via an early job board, but maybe even through a newspaper advertisement! As recruitment experts, we take for granted all of the more efficient and effective ways of hiring today; strategies that produce better results for less investment in time and money.

We know how the world has evolved for hiring roles at all different levels and from many different industries because we are recruitment natives, not tourists.

With talent acquisition becoming more complex, and the stakes never higher, the fixes to solve talent challenges are increasingly longer term, more strategic and less transactional:

These are all drivers for seeking a partnership with a total talent solutions provider.

Time Changes the Talent Landscape
What many recruitment experts still don’t appreciate is how Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) has been through a period of rapid evolution. This is especially the case with pure play RPO providers who are not held back by a legacy recruitment agency business that is driven by a different set of values. We are no longer simply a way of managing recruitment more efficiently but, as a total talent solutions partner, driven by our clients need for more.


In the 1990s, RPO was all about process efficiency and low cost rather than value and expertise. It only really worked where a solution was enterprise wide on a scale of multi-thousand hires. Not today. More and more we are seeing organisations with sophisticated internal talent acquisition functions that look to RPOs as a place to leverage scalability, market knowledge, strategic workforce planning, technology expertise and employer branding. No longer is RPO the low-cost, low value option; it is the option which organisations are seeking out to do things better. It is RPOptimized™. And I love that.

[eBook] 4 Promises Your Talent Solutions Provider Must Keep: How to Decipher  Performance, Falsities & Half Truths

About Craig Sweeney

As executive vice president, global strategic talent solutions, Craig leads WilsonHCG's growth strategy and new partnership cultivation across the globe. Alongside the trusted consultants at WilsonHCG, he builds market-leading, scalable and customisable RPO solutions. Craig's relationships span all industry verticals and geographies with expertise in technology, business services, financial services, engineering, manufacturing, retail, and media.