How You Should Read Offshore Recruiting’s Rep

Done right, offshore recruiting — for certain types of positions — works beautifully, claim its fans. You can get a pipe line of quality candidates at great prices. But the problem arises if you don’t follow the rules, which are specific. Then the process can come back to bite you. And it has chomped many folks. Hence its bad rep.

But there are ways to do it smoothly. For starters, “it’s important that the client using the offshore recruiting service has a strong and committed leader dedicated to developing it,” says Brian Cotter, president of PSG Global Solutions. In addition, the client has to do what it takes to treat the offshore recruiting team as its own. Of course, this is not easy. But it can be done.

To learn how and for more useful tips, attend my session on offshore recruiting at the Executive Forum in San Diego on March 21st. Cotter will be joined by other experts like Jack Unroe, eTeam’sBen Thakur and CDI Corporation’s Dirk Kent — all long-time practitioners of offshore recruiting — who explain the process and how to make it work.

The fact is that offshore recruiting may not be right for you. Using recruiters based overseas to perform part of or the full cycle of your recruiting function is not for everybody. Some staffing firms like eTeam are doing it on their own by setting up one or more centers overseas and then using those recruiters to work on specific job requisitions. Others like CDI have contracted with an offshore provider and outsourced either all or some portions of their recruiting cycle.

The model you end up choosing is dependent on the culture and your needs.  Regardless of what you choose, there are significant up-front and ongoing costs related to infrastructure, training and project management.

In today’s world where human capital is a company’s competitive advantage, the upside of understanding a recruiting process that can save big bucks and give a 24-hour delivery model can be high. As Unroe says, “Offshore recruiting is not a perfect solution. But … it will produce results.”

Have you tried offshore recruiting? Tell us what you think.