Chrysalis Group is considering outsourcing its entire recruitment process, the media organisation’s HR chief has revealed.
The company, which owns the Heart, Galaxy and LBC radio stations and music and publishing businesses, is in the early stages of discussion with Capital Consulting about an outsourcing deal.
Craig Warden, HR director at Chrysalis, said he was keen to modernise recruitment at the company, which employs 750 staff.
“Recruitment is all handled at a local level as the HR team is too small [with six in the department],” he told Personnel Today. “We are looking at outsourcing the entire recruitment process, including moving some of it online.”
Chrysalis uses traditional methods for recruitment, including recruiting directly from rivals, word of mouth and trade press advertisements, but Warden wants to increase the use of technology.
The company has already started “beefing up” its corporate intranet to improve the internal recruitment process, Warden said.
The move followed the success of an HR admin system, which reduced the HR workload by 20%.
Improving efficiency and cutting costs are key aims for Warden’s HR team, which acts as a central service for Chrysalis’ three businesses (radio, music and publishing).
“Compared with other music firms, we are vastly under-resourced, but Chrysalis runs a tight operation,” he said.
“We have to justify every penny we spend. The HR function started six years ago with just me, and I had to fight for every new job, by explaining how we have an impact on the bottom line.”
Chrysalis has just launched a quarterly scorecard, which assesses the style, delivery and content of the HR department’s initiatives to measure success.
This runs alongside the annual employee survey, which has seen an 80% response rate for the past two years.
