'India is one of the biggest potential markets for Randstad'

BENGALURU: Randstad, the second biggest global staffing company by sales, believes that recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) -where an employer transfers all or part of its recruitment processes to an external service provider -will be the next big trend in HR. In an exclusive interaction with TOI, CFO Robert Jan van de Kraats and Randstad India CEO Moorthy Uppaluri, say India is one of the important sourcing centres for the Amsterdam-based company. Excerpts:
Where is India placed in Randstad's global map?

Van de Kraats: The US is our biggest market followed by Japan and UK. India is one of the biggest potential markets for Randstad. In size, it is at the lower end of the top 20 countries for us now but is growing more rapidly than the group average. There are about 1,000 employees here, serving both local and international clients. We do not ask them to be profitable but to be successful in the more mature part of business and reinvest the returns in expanding.

Which areas of recruitment are doing well for you in India?

Uppaluri: Our expertise is in designing a process that can handle big volumes rather than singular transactions. We have a flex business (or temporary staffing), where employees are on our payrolls but deployed with clients. We have about 60,000 such employees in India. Here, we invoice our clients with the amount of wages we have paid. But a bulk of our business — and the higher margins — comes from recruitment of middle and junior management. Here, we charge a fee based on what the candidate is paid.

We hear recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is becoming an important business for you.

Van de Kraats: It is a new trend that is catching up in the HR services industry. RPO has been adopted by MNCs, especially in the US, and also a few Indian companies, since this model, backed by technology, helps in cost-effective and consistent talent acquisition. There are clients in telecom, pharma, banking and manufacturing that rely completely on RPO and have shrunk their talent acquisition teams. We have a sourcing centre in India that caters to our American clients — people sit together jointly and look for candidates supported by technology, including platforms like LinkedIn.

Uppaluri: We have 250 employees working in this space in India. RPO is like a factory, which you set up for large volumes.

How do you see the RPO opportunity in India?

Uppaluri: The concepts of Digital India and Make in India are creating a growth spurt. E-commerce is growing rapidly. Wherever there is a growth activity, RPO is the best solution for quality assurance. About 5% of our clients have adopted RPO in India, while four years back, it was nothing.

How do you see the competition from LinkedIn, which is strengthening its recruitment solutions?

Uppaluri: LinkedIn is a channel, it does not do candidate validation. If you go to a job recruiter, he takes the job description, searches for tag words and finds it in LinkedIn, but that is only one-third of the job in Randstad's world. We look at three dimensions when finding a job for a candidate — job, boss and company fit. A boss for a prospective candidate is very important. Someone who can fit an entrepreneurial set up may not be fit for a big company.