Offshore delivery centers are a growing tool in talent acquisition. Historically, these centers have been leveraged for the cost efficiencies they brought to business process outsourcing programs. More recently, Offshore delivery centers are being used to strengthen compliance, drive broader operational efficiencies and improve recruitment performance. The change is driven by an increasingly globalized workforce, a competitive recruiting landscape and increased risk due to a complicated patchwork of compliance regulations.
Positive economic growth in the U.S. and around the world is making it more difficult to find and attract the talent necessary to stay ahead in the global economy. A skills shortage brought on by automation is making the process even more difficult. Low unemployment rates mean candidates have a lot of choices, so employers need to meet candidate expectations during the recruitment process to hire top talent.
However, the compliance landscape is becoming more complicated. The patchwork of compliance laws across the U.S. is complicated and constantly changing. That, combined with increased employment class-action litigation, leaves employers facing extraordinary risk. This means employers not only have to provide a strong candidate experience, but they also have to account for the variety of regulations that apply.
To overcome these obstacles, employers and RPO providers are engaging offshore delivery centers to manage parts of the recruitment process. These delivery centers are effective because combined with an innovate technology solution, they can drive efficiencies and ensure compliance through strict adherence to workflows. In this blog post, we will cover the benefits of offshore delivery models in dealing with policy and regulatory compliance issues, how these models fit with a technology solution and how to find an RPO partner with global delivery expertise.
Supporting Policy and Regulatory Compliance
There are three major benefits to an offshore delivery center: cost, operational efficiency and ensure compliance. In addition to cost-savings realized through a global delivery center, technology, workflow and audit operations can be orchestrated to drive operational efficiency, as well as compliance with corporate and regulatory guidelines. Below are a few ways in which global delivery centers can improve the hiring process.
Background Screening and Drug Testing
Standardized corporate policies requiring completed background investigations and drug tests have been the norm across large employers in the U.S. However, the proliferation of different state and local laws regarding the use of criminal background investigations in the hiring process and the variations in the legal treatment of the use of marijuana in different jurisdictions have injected significant complexity into hiring practices. Employers faced with the need for different drug testing criteria and background investigation procedures can encode and apply variegated workflows for different jurisdictions, without a significant increase in compliance cost or risk, when these are initiated, executed and audited at an offshore delivery center.
Properly Written Job Requisitions
An offshore delivery center can be used to ensure that every job requisition is complete and compliant. Hiring manager or recruiter errors frequently undermine the effectiveness, policy adherence and regulatory compliance of job descriptions. A common approach to this issue has been to force the posting of only static, unchangeable job descriptions that are pre-approved. Times have changed, and it is more important than ever to allow hiring managers to highlight differentiators and add information that will attract the best from a very limited candidate pool. A compliance review of every job description prior to posting or distributing a job description is an essential step in ensuring compliance with OFCCP and other regulatory criteria fixed elements like accurate compensation ranges, and ensuring a minimum acceptable quality level.
Building Global Compliance Teams
As many organizations turn to a global sourcing and recruitment model, an offshore delivery center can be used to quickly and easily set up compliance standard operation procedures for each country in which an organization operates. Because each team is only focused on one set of regulations and they follow a set procedure, the teams can avoid the confusion that arises from dealing with a variety of regulations in different countries. This system can ensure compliance for companies with a large global presence.
Increased Diversity and Decreased Bias
Offshore delivery centers can also be used to increase diversity and decrease bias throughout the recruitment process. For one organization that takes advantage of PeopleScout’s offshore delivery center in Gurgaon, candidates first take an online assessment and are then screened by staff at the center against criteria specified in the job descriptions and subsequently slated for recruiter and hiring manager review. This process reduces the possibility of bias, and translates to a more diverse slate of qualified candidates and reduced risk of discrimination.
Supporting Improved Recruitment Results
In addition to helping create a compliant recruitment program, offshore delivery centers can also improve recruitment results and candidates experience.
Posting to Community and Diversity Job Boards
Most well-known job boards take XML feeds, which allows distribution to be automated. However, job boards like those run by community churches or local unions sometimes still require someone to reach out personally. When an employer has a large volume of open positions, posting to these types of boards can take a lot of recruiter time and the process becomes prohibitively expensive. When an offshore delivery center handles this type of posting, organizations don’t leave these candidates on the table. Additionally, these job boards are also often a source of diverse candidates, which improves diversity hiring.
Timeliness
To keep up with candidate expectations, employers need a fast recruitment process. An offshore delivery center can speed up the process of candidate engagement through procedures designed to accelerate the strongest candidates through to interviews and offers. For one client that takes advantage of PeopleScout’s global delivery center in Gurgaon, India, PeopleScout has met 100 percent of all timeliness metrics for the past three years for tens of thousands of annual hires by engaging with candidates 24 hours a day.
Building a Diverse and High Performing Workforce
In addition to the tangible benefits during the recruitment process, an offshore delivery center also provides the benefits of a diverse and global workforce, including creative new ideas and perspectives and higher productivity. At PeopleScout, employees in our offshore delivery centers in India have provided unique insights and ideas, assisting teams in the U.S. and Canada. In one instance, a recruiter with an educational background in quantitative sciences was able to provide insights that led to the deployment of a local work allocation system that significantly reduced the time it takes us to screen new applicants.
In specialized fields of endeavor, recruiters with specific knowledge and educational expertise are better equipped to screen and select candidates. While it would be prohibitive and less likely to engage engineers, programmers, chemists and other professionals as recruiters in the U.S. and most of Europe, offshore delivery centers have allowed forward-thinking RPO firms to build recruiting teams with these skilled professionals.
Technology and the Offshore Delivery Model
Finding the Right Balance
Innovative technology, including AI, is an important part of any recruiting program. A typical talent acquisition technology stack now includes an ATS, an integrated CRM platform and a myriad of other tools. We have never been better positioned to use analytics to help us make decisions and drive better recruiting outcomes. Striking a balance is important to ensure that we arrive at outcomes that are aligned to organizational goals and are within regulatory guardrails. For instance, using a technology-enabled first-pass to screen requisitions can ensure that a job description is accurate across objective features. That can be followed by a human second-pass screen to review flagged areas and screen more subjective areas of the job description like ensuring that the basic qualifications for the job description are defensible from a compliance standpoint. Another example concerns the use of artificial intelligence-enabled systems to source candidates. All such systems run the inherent risk of allowing biases inherent in prior hiring decisions to perpetuate and amplify across future recruiting efforts. Allowing for a recruiter-led review of systems generated results ensures that all good candidates are appropriately considered. Global delivery centers allow for efficient ways to address the required balance between systems and human interactions across the recruiting life-cycle.
Stepping up Where AI Falls Short
Offshore delivery centers can also take on tasks that AI and automation aren’t able to do yet. For instance, when a new law goes into effect that impacts the recruiting process in a certain region, a new standard operating procedure can be established and deployed in an offshore delivery center within hours. Making that change across a complex technology stack would involve multiple rounds of programming and testing, which would take more time and amplify the risk of compliance issues until deployment.
Finding a Partner
An RPO provider is a valuable partner for organizations looking to take advantage of the benefits of an offshore delivery center. RPOs have expertise in managing clients across the spectrum of compliance needs, so they can quickly implement a customized plan. That experience also means that RPO providers can pivot quickly to address any change in the compliance landscape, developing a standard operating procedure and applying it to any client who may be impacted.
As you’re looking for an RPO partner with offshore delivery capabilities, be sure to assess their ability to address cost, operations, and compliance efficiencies across the entire talent acquisition model.
