During the presentation John Mortimer announced that the Angela Mortimer Group would be resigning from working with one prominent RPO organisation and potentially six others. In justifying his reasoning for the decision John Mortimer stated that Angela Mortimer consultants were 3 times more effective at recruiting and putting candidates forward for interview in comparison with their work via a managed RPO organisation.
This fearless announcement has unsurprisingly caused controversy on both sides of the argument in the ensuing month. After an article was published by The Recruiter Magazine (18/03 - http://bit.ly/1SJ5gAp), detailing the events of the presentation held at the Angela Mortimer office in Soho, several SME’s immediately declared support for Angela Mortimer and its stance. Both Rubicon Consulting and Revolutionary Recruitment Resources publicly endorsed Angela Mortimer via twitter, the former stating, ‘we walked away from ours too, because of exactly the same reasons as you’, whilst Revolutionary Recruitment Resources tweeted, ‘brave move by Angela Mortimer – plenty of others to follow suit no doubt’.
A second article was more recently published by The Recruiter Magazine (29/03 - http://bit.ly/1qjZlel) formally giving a voice to the RPO community to have their say in response. Despite the inevitable backlash from three RPO organisations, support from SMEs continued to surface via Twitter, Linked In and also in responses to John Mortimer’s open letter. This was shared with the Angela Mortimer client network (13/04). A most notable comment on the subject came from Lucy Walker, MD of Leeds based agency Lucy Walker Recruitment, ‘I so agree with your comment today re RPO contracts and wanted to congratulate you on ‘speaking out’ on this topic that is, I agree, ‘unworkable’.
Since the two articles have gone live, the initial piece has been the 2nd most popular on The Recruiter Magazine website, and the contracts page of the Angela Mortimer website has had a 30% increase in viewership. The second and third presentations in the RPO series will be taking place in Birmingham and Manchester on 16th and 17th May.
CASE STUDIES
The Good Experience:
We were approached by an international law firm who were unable to fill their roles due to the calibre of staff that their in house and RPO staff were sourcing. The approach came from the RPO to include us within the services they offer their client.
We were able to agree terms with the RPO, giving us the opportunity to provide methods of recruitment, whilst managing the full recruitment process, keeping the RPO and client fully informed through out. 13 years later we are still working together. Within the last 18 months we have received instructions for 12 jobs, but have actually filled 15 due to replacements. This three way partnership is expected to go from strength to strength and proves there is a model that suits organisations who want to outsource their recruitment, whilst still benefiting from working with specialist agencies.
The Bad Experience:
We had a partnership based in the Midlands with a global accountancy firm through an RPO. The RPO were working on the permanent vacancies but were unable to fill the positions. The RPO came to us for help filling these roles with immediate start candidates, as they had exhausted the planned hand over time having failed to recruit from their own efforts. The RPO needed the same, high calibre candidates they were looking for permanently but who could start immediately. We were able to fill all of these roles.
We were already working through the RPO on their reduced fees, but due to their poor performance and encroaching on the client’s desired start date we were asked to deliver the same high calibre permanent candidates who could start within 48 hours – for this we were asked to bill only half of the already reduced fee as the candidates started temp-perm. This meant we performed an outstanding candidate search service for 4 unique vacancies, that the RPO could not, but we were forced to provide a 65% discount for our service.
Something in between:
We have been working with a global bank for a number of years recruiting across their business divisions at all levels. In addition to this, we ran a payroll for a group of specialist workers. Our specialist department - who also have a long standing relationship with the bank - were contacted to recruit for their chairman's office, whilst they went through a change in RPO supplier.
An excellent candidate was recruited and started working in the chairman's office. Due to procedural changes, the invoices for this candidate were sent over directly to the RPO rather than being approved directly as previously agreed with the bank. The RPO took offence that we had recruited an excellent candidate without involved in the process. As a result they refused our invoices and issued us with a 50+ page contract heavily restricting our recruitment activities and ultimately the controls we have for ensuring quality.
All this for a 1 year contract simply to confirm the placement of a staff member who had already been recruited. More over this staff member was being well paid and the cost of this being met by Angela Mortimer throughout the episode. This tested our relationship with the client. The end result was that the bank removed the RPO from the process, made us the preferred supplier for the chairman's office and we're now working with the bank across all levels of their business.