Multinational IT company Cisco has seen big improvements in its internal recruiting function since it started grouping recruiters by service level rather than business unit, says Asia-Pacific staffing manager Paulette Ansara.

Ansara told the IT18 Conference last week that until 18 months ago, Cisco recruiters were generally all senior-level consultants, whose roles focused on end-to-end recruitment for one dedicated business area.

"That model just wasn't working so well. They would get slammed with requisitions and they just wouldn't have the bandwidth to really consult, engage, direct-source and do all of the things that a good senior recruiter should be doing," she said.

Following global consultation between recruitment, HR and the company's leaders, Cisco decided to separate the recruiting staff into four groups, each specialising in a particular service:

• High engagement - This division was the domain of senior recruiters, said Ansara, and handled all "complex, niche" job orders. "They cannot work on more than 15 [vacancies at a time] because we really want to allow them to become consultants - to be able to do all the good stuff, like direct sourcing";
• Scale and services - This group only handled high-volume recruitment assignments, Ansara said. "In our professional services side of the business, we have a technical support centre. It's not uncommon for them to say 'We're supporting a new technology, we now need to hire 10 engineers'... so it's large, project-based recruiting efforts";
• Expedited - "[This] is basically the drive-through, quick service. No sourcing is required because most of the time it's converting a temp that we have," she said, or in other cases the hiring manager already had a candidate in mind. "It's really just co-ordination. It's administration. It's pumping out an offer letter, and this is where we have put some of our junior recruiters who aspire to get more experience";
• Internal - This was a completely new area for Cisco, said Ansara, and focused on recruiting employees from one part of the business into another. "[These recruiters] get to build pipelines of internal employees and the types of opportunities they're interested in, and they will go market that to the high-engagement and the scaling services recruiters".

Cisco now had more career progression options for its recruiters, said Ansara, and the new model also allowed the staffing team to match their service to the specific needs of individual line managers, which was a "game changer" for the business.

How Cisco Australia recruits

Ansara said Cisco employed 70,000 workers globally and 1,200 in Australia.

(The company has previously said that although it used RPO in the past it went back to a fully internal model because it saw recruitment as a core business activity.)

There were two local high-engagement recruiters for the Australian business, she said, but internal and expedited recruitment was managed at a regional level and Australia was not a service "hub", like China and India, so it didn't need high-volume recruiters.

"40-50% of our roles in the Australia/New Zealand region are filled internally, so we only have to go to market just over 50% of the time."