Staffing Industry Executive Forum
March 10th, 2008 by Brian
I attended Staffing Industry’s Executive Forum in Las Vegas this past week. The SI Exec Forum is particularly successful in bringing together public company staffing executives and owners of fast growing private staffing firms. This year, the SI planners chose to locate the event 20 miles from the Las Vegas strip ($50 cab ride each way) which therefore resulted in record attendance of all the events, an unusual occurrence for a Las Vegas conference. Not sure if that was strategic on their part, or whether they simply went for the cheaper resort, but either way it probably saved me considerable gambling losses due to the inconvenience of the location relative to the strip. Kudos to you Staffing Industry, Inc.
A big buzz at the conference was the relatively new concept of the offshore RPO and I had the opportunity to meet some of the industry leaders in that field. Christopher Even, Director of Global Marketing from RPO Worldwide and Aaron Green, President of PSG, both provided an informative and compelling discussion of opportunities and challenges that exist with offshore RPO. The opportunities as one would expect is the ability to leverage a low cost workforce and the bulk of the challenges centered around communication and integrating the offshore component to one’s onshore team as seamlessly as possible.
I asked the panel how they go about measuring the service’s effectiveness and potential ROI for their customers and was extremely encouraged by their response. Ok, clearly it was a loaded question as one of Glandore Systems’ flag ship products does exactly this in real time. Instead, I was told that one needs to give the offshore partnership time to evaluate it (30 day hypothetical scenario I gave was dismissed as being much too short a time to be able to measure it’s ROI). The panel’s response indicated to me that one of Glandore Systems’ technology solutions for offshore RPO’s represents an eminently large market opportunity. The offshore RPO industry is clearly is in its infancy and congrats to Chris and Aaron for forging the way with the services and infrastructure.
