The Mouchel Group is a consulting and business services company that provides management, commercial and engineering solutions. Based in West Byfleet, Surrey, it employs more than 11,000 staff at 100 offices in the UK and overseas, and last year had a turnover of £448m.

Three years ago an independent assessment suggested that Mouchel outsource its recruitment, saying that line managers were overburdened and did not feel supported, and candidates were getting an inconsistent experience across the group. However, Rose Bevan, head of resourcing, felt “very strongly” that they wanted to keep recruitment in-house. “Our people are central to our very business, they are our main asset,” says Bevan. “We were quite unusual in that we went the opposite route to outsourcing and even centralising recruitment, and devolved recruitment entirely to our line managers.”

More than 600 line managers in 40 separate business units now have full responsibility in deciding who they want to recruit and are supported by a range of online tools including a preferred supplier network, interview packs and psychometric testing.

The changeover was handled by a series of road shows training line managers in the e-recruitment system and interviewing techniques. Now the system is in place, says Bevan, there is constant checking to make sure it is running smoothly. “We discovered that our line managers were getting stuck on the admin,” she says.

The company has already saved £1.8m from an overall spend of £21m, mainly due to increasing the number of direct rather than agency hires. “Our line managers have ownership of their teams now and are evangelical about advocating the company, which has hugely increased staff loyalty,” says Bevan. “If we had outsourced it all we would have lost that richness and sense of responsibility.”

There are other reasons for businesses not to follow the outsourcing trend, according to Gill Stewart, managing director of recruitment outsourcer Carlisle Managed Solutions: “For a start, you can’t outsource a problem, whatever it is. Some companies see outsourcing as a miracle cure but you can’t pass a hot potato on.”

If a company doesn’t know what it wants from outsourcing, she says, it is difficult for the outsourcer to know what they should be delivering. “It is a real discipline to go into RO and the tender process is really important. A lot of thought needs to go into it.”

David Plummer, managing director of IT services provider Parity Resources, says: “RO can be very successful for graduate recruitment, for example, where it is high volume and there are no shortage of applicants. But where it can fail is the resource- competitive, niche and high-value market. If you have a requirement for obscure skills and the RO knows nothing about them, then the RO will struggle to find staff, and these could be critical roles for your company.”

And if the business is too small, “it might not be for you,” says Gary Brager, HR outsourcing research manager at analyst Nelson Bostock. “Generally we’re looking at companies hiring 200 people a year, which could be a small but fast-moving company, whereas a bigger one might not be hiring that much.”

So rather than taking the wrong decision to go into RO, some companies might find that the RO option is not for them.

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