Software Solutions for the Human Capital Industry

BBC’s The Real Hustle is a TV show focusing on how easy it is to be scammed and conned in every day life. This week, the team posed as recruitment consultants, highlighting the trust that job seekers are willing to impart during their job search.

The clip is an eye-opener - “identity theft on a grand scale”. In this episode, the girl gives her passport number and bank statements, which allow the hustlers to apply for mortgages, credit cards, duplicate passports, and birth certificates all in her name. She is not alone, as the other job seekers give their details without question, assuming that the recruitment agency is on their side. The staffing industry is very fragmented with the majority of recruitment companies doing less than $2 million in revenue. With so many small, owner-operated agencies, it is difficult to know who you can trust.

What The Real Hustle describes as “a steady stream of job seekers all willing to divulge their personal details” exists on the internet on a scale a million times larger. Due to the lower barrier to entry for online recruitment sites, without the need to rent an office or put on a suit, the online jobs market is even more fragmented and inherently less trustworthy. Even the most “legit” job sites have shown that, even if they do have your best interests in mind, they do not always take the steps necessary to protect your identity.

People often underestimate the value of information, but even something as inconspicuous as a maiden name is sometimes used as a password for banking. In this video, the girl is asked to choose a 4-digit pin number as part of her application, and she uses the same one as on her bank card. This is often the case with the passwords people choose online. Bad practices, such as storing plain-text passwords, are always going to exist; improving awareness is the key for now.

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.