Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic brought a rapid, possibly permanent, change to the recruitment landscape in 2020. Agencies part of industries taking a severe hit, startups and SMEs had to lay off or furlough their employees in order to ensure survival. Businesses have been struggling to maintain continuity in this COVID storm, and one of their top priorities has been to sail through to safe shores and stay alive.
2020 was difficult, and we have just stepped into the new year 2021, yet the uncertainty lingers on as the UK endures another lockdown being subjected to a new COVID-19 strain. The long wait of a return back to normal and uncertainty clouded around it has global business landscape worried, and businesses cannot stay closed forever, can they?
As staffing firms sail through this COVID storm with rains of recession, weak & volatile market, and lockdown restrictions, forward-looking recruitment leaders understand that change is necessary, an inevitability to navigate out of the ongoing uncertainties created by the pandemic and thrive in the new normal. Recruitment agencies must reflect on current processes, review, press the reset switch, and rebuild businesses strategies to endure any potential crises, even thrive in it.
So, what factors must agencies take into consideration before executing the process reset? How to ensure the rebuild is a long-term success?
QX pivoted its operations and went through a brand revamp to function efficiently. The dynamic of the industry may have forever been changed by this pandemic and so we, at QX, brought all over domains together under one umbrella - one new unique website amalgamating all units with an aim to reset and rebuild QX to become QX Global Group.
Press the Reset Button
One of the main priorities of recruitment agencies while planning an operating reset is employee well-being and safety, that they work in a safe environment, whether that is an office or home, while ensuring they can operate efficiently and help steer the business forward unimpeded. Another priority is to gain an adequate level of operating flexibility, cost-efficiency, and scalability, enabling the agencies to cater to high-volume staffing demands swiftly and gain the capability to beat market volatility with ease.
The lockdown enforced by COVID pandemic forced the hands of business leaders to explore and adopt new ways of working, a flexible remote working model, which in turn pushed them to revisit and review their current process fundamentals around prevalent organisational structure, the agility or rigidity of it, cultural collaboration and communication, and process efficiency.
To deliver superior candidate and customer support, to deliver high-touch engagement and ensure fine candidate and recruitment experience – these form part of core values of staffing agencies since aeons. And they are now more important than ever in this uncertain period.
So, here’s what you need to do:
- Revisit and review your prevalent process fundamentals
- Identify the gaps
- Plan how you can fill those gaps
- Press the reset button
- Plan a future-proof rebuild identifying and integrating operating processes that add flexibility and scalability to your recruitment business
- Implement it and maintain continuous optimisation
- Set yourself up for the future, no matter how uncertain the present is!
When QX went through the Process Reset
With the news of COVID-19 infections slowly surging in India and monitoring the situation globally, especially in Europe, our BCP team anticipated a lockdown looming, and started making proactive plans around the transition from work-from-office to work-from-home model. Before resetting, our leadership and BCP team took the following points into consideration:
- Need to gain client consent before transition implementation
- Identify and prioritise business-critical processes for transition
- Client, candidate, and team communication must be maintained
- Team collaborative approach needs to be facilitated
- Data privacy and security must be sustained
- Employee well-being and safety must remain paramount
- Need to lean on technology to adapt to a new way of working
As pointed above, we decided to lean on technology to ensure our service delivery capability remains unimpeded by the transition while also bringing about a collaborative culture with 1300+ employees working from home. Gaining client consent and addressing their concerns around data privacy, security and GDPR compliance.
Operating in the new normal, QX RPO UK helped staffing firms attain organisational agility and flexibility - not to mention increased cost efficiency - during the uncertain, challenging period of COVID-19 lockdown, allowing them to ramp up or down their offshore team with ease to cope with market volatility and enabling them to scale up swiftly to meet high-volume demands that may follow market recovery.
Nearing one year of adopting the WFH model, QX has decided to make permanent changes to the structure of the operating model – a rebuild to ensure the business grows progressively against any potential crisis, to safeguard employee well-being and safety, to continue delivering quality service to clients. QX Limited is revamping its brand to become QX Global Group.
QX Global Group- Enabling Transformation from QX Global Group on Vimeo.
Rebuild to leave uncertainties behind
It is in people’s nature to resist change, but it is also a necessity, it is the only constant, and business leaders learned this the hard way. Most business leaders had resisted the idea of employees working from home adopting an offshore outsourcing model, but now their hands have been forced to embrace it simply to ensure business continuity. They’ve finally had to accept that it is necessary to change, reset and rebuild not only to combat current COVID crisis but to prepare for any uncertainty that the future may bring.
Recruitment Business leaders understand:
- they need to accept the new way of working - a workforce that operates from anywhere,
- they must build new growth strategies to succeed in most uncertain times and build a scalable value centre,
- the importance of attaining organisational agility and operating flexibility,
- the importance of maintaining healthy cash flow and liquidity (not just p&i),
- the need to integrate digitalisation and drive innovation to stand out in the competitive landscape,
- the need to reassess current operating models for operating efficiency, cost arbitrage and business transformation.
If your staffing agency is in need of a rebuild, you must take the following points into consideration:
- Keep revisiting your business strategies and goals periodically.
- Identify process gaps. Take corrective and preventive actions with amendments and pivots to address these gaps. Continuous optimisation is crucial.
- Integrate recruitment tech stack into your process. E.g., ATS, Automation AI.
- Don’t undermine high-touch because of high-tech. Maintain a high-touch approach in all your engagements with clients and candidates.
- Always strive to deliver excellent recruitment and candidate experience.
- Let your growth strategies be data-driven and your strategies KPI-driven.
- Encourage transparent and collaborative culture within your organisation
- Take outside support if it fosters growth. An offshore RPO support will help your business immense operating flexibility and scalability.
How QX rebuilt to help staffing agencies
As pointed out above, continuous optimisation through corrective and preventive actions is critical, and that is what the QX leadership focused on as the work-from-home experiment commenced for 1300+ employees and 100+ recruitment agencies.
- Clients were contacted via emails and phone calls to gain WFH consent, addressing their apprehensions around data privacy, security and GDPR compliance.
- Knowledge transfer was carried out (and still gets carried out) to ensure staff takes adequate precautions around data privacy and security.
- Required tools and technology were provided to the remote workforce to ensure they operate efficiently.
- New project management and communication tools were integrated within the process to promote transparent communication and enhanced collaborative approach.
- Major business-centric processes were transformed to cope with the market changes, facilitate a new way of working and support workforce and customers efficiently.
- Our out-of-hours RPO services, including 24x7 candidate sourcing outsourcing and locum booking management support, elevated clients’ staffing capability and helped them scale back from the severe hits they took because of the COVID pandemic.
- QX introduced new services for prospects and current clients to help them navigate the uncertainty in the global business landscape created by the COVID crisis. QX Accounting Services division offered dedicated support to accounting agencies and bookkeepers around the UK government COVID schemes. QX RPO UK division offered bespoke front, mid and back-office support to recruitment agencies at reduced rates and/or deferred payment terms to help them through the difficult times.
- The digital marketing efforts were renewed to focus solely on delivering informative content that helps recruitment businesses during COVID. We collaborated with some great minds, well-known influencers such as Ian Knowlson, Kevin Green, Lucy Cohen, Carl Reader and many more, who offered valuable, actionable insights to staffing and accounting firms in the UK.
- As the great Work-From-Home experiment proved to be a great success for QX, it was decided that the WFH model will become an essential model for the future. A new model was implemented for the workforce, enabling them to operate from home, office or both, decision subject to management and client consent and process criticality.
- Along with the process rebuild, QX Limited also moved to reposition their brand as global service providers catering to clients based in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and EU geographies. We merged our divisional websites to become one website, one brand – QX Global Group
Offshore RPO Solution – Helping Staffing Firms Navigate through Uncertainties
One of the primary reasons staffing businesses opt to outsource recruitment process is to reduce operating cost – saving money on in-house resources and expensive overheads. However, another major benefit RPO services offer is that they give agencies added agility, flexibility and scalability, enabling them to ramp down or scale up their team swiftly to cope with market volatility. RPO partnership also allows businesses to benefit from the latest recruitment technology and work with a dedicated team of offshore recruiters and sourcing experts of their own choosing.
To summarise, RPO is one of the most beneficial solutions staffing agencies can opt for to navigate out of the storm of uncertainties, whether created by COVID or any other factor and set themselves for long-term success.
QX Global Group provides outsourced recruiting, accounting, finance, IT and advisory services to global business. The offshore team based in India offers bespoke solutions through dedicated as well as shared services model serving businesses from recruitment, healthcare, manufacturing, finance, student accommodation and many more sectors.