Payroll news

Preferred Supplier Lists (PSLs) 12.10.2009 What is a preferred supplier list? When recruiting for staff the buzz word over the last few years has been PSL! Has your HR Manager asked you “Is that agency on our PSL?” So what does this mean? PSL stands for Preferred Suppliers List and is "industry speak" for a list of approved recruitment suppliers. In the UK across the whole workforce the average recruitment cost of filling a vacancy per employee with management and professionals is £4,333, with a high proportion of organisations still working with recruitment agencies to help fill their vacancies. Even during this recession, staff are being recruited and agencies are being used to find staff. With ongoing cost of recruiting new staff, HR departments are encouraged to save costs. One way to do this is to introduce a PSL. By introducing a PSL lower rates are agreed, a handful of agencies are chosen to work with that particular organisation and recruiting managers have easily accessible details of which agencies they can use and terms have already been agreed. Organisations are also able to compare and monitor agency performance. A well known engineering and manufacturing organisation had over 280 recruitment agencies across the board to help them recruit for staff in the UK. After restructuring their recruitment process and introducing a PSL they now have six preferred suppliers and a handful of approved suppliers. This allowed them to monitor cost, relevance of CVs and quality of recruit. With the obvious benefit to the client what is the benefit to the recruitment agency? They are the only one or one of very few agencies that are able to recruit for that particular role and have a higher chance to fill it. But how does this effect the recruitment for specialist roles like payroll? A number of my clients who work for large organisations have been frustrated by having to use their PSL’s and have been told that they are not able to deal with agencies outside this. One of their main frustrations have been that as payroll is a niche skill set non specialist recruitment agencies do not have an understanding of what is required. They are not aware of key skills that are required for a payroll person, for example systems, payroll size, industry and legislation knowledge. A client asked me to work on a role after a non payroll specialist had sent them CV’s that were not suitable for the role. For example the candidate had processed a payroll for 20 employees and also worked on a reception. That would be okay if the job was for a part-time payroll assistant who was sitting on reception but not for a firm of solicitors processing a payroll for 2000 employees! Usually you are able to recruit outside your PSL if you are unable to find a candidate through you designated agencies. But because the agencies that are on your PSL are most probably non specialist agencies you still have to go through the process to find a candidate through them before you can look outside. This process can take weeks. You maybe thinking that this is okay because I do not recruit on a regular basis. With the threat of swine flu looming this autumn and winter it is a realistic fact that you may of have one or two staff out of your department at one time. People still need to be paid and it can be unrealistic to wait two weeks to go through a process before you can recruit a payroll person. What to do next? Do some homework, speak to your HR department see if they have got a PSL in place. If they haven’t, inquire if it is something that they are thinking of introducing to the organisation. If it is a yes, ask them if your department can be exempt from this, if not find out if you can to add a specialist payroll recruitment agency. If they have got a PSL in place find out how you can work outside this agreement. There usually is a clause in the contract which allows an agency to be added on a second tier system or for specialist roles like payroll you can work outside this agreement. Find out what the terms are of the current agreement and when it will be up for renewal.