The Basking Ridge, New Jersey-based telecom provider has 20,000 employees around the world and expects to see 20 percent growth globally—particularly in India and Europe—during the next year.

The company wants to outsource its recruitment process to improve its quality of hires and fill jobs faster, Roger Gaston, senior vice president of human resources, told attendees at the Conference Board Human Resources Outsourcing Conference, which took place at the Drake Hotel in Chicago on September 19 and 20.

By outsourcing its recruitment processes, Avaya also hopes to reduce its reliance on outside staffing agencies, which make up 30 percent of its staffing globally, Gaston told Workforce Management after his presentation.

Avaya wants to implement recruitment process outsourcing globally, rather than start in the United States and then expand, because it hopes to apply standard processes, Gaston says. "We want to do it all at once," he said. "We might find out that the barriers are too big, but that’s what we want to try."

Gaston is no stranger to recruitment process outsourcing.

At StorageTek, he oversaw this process with Kenexa, a Wayne, Pennsylvania-based recruitment processing provider. As a result, StorageTek saw the number of days it took to fill positions drop from 84 in 2004 to 28 in 2005. Also, the company’s utilization of staffing agencies dropped from 14.3 percent in the first quarter of 2005 to 9.3 percent in the second quarter.

Implementing a global recruitment process outsourcing deal is "very ambitious," says Brett Gerard, an analyst at TPI, an HRO advisor based in the Woodlands, Texas.

There aren’t any true global RPO providers today, experts say. But Avaya could work with an RPO provider, who then would partner with RPO providers abroad, Gerard says.

Another option for Avaya would be to partner with an RPO provider and share the cost of building a global RPO platform, he says.

More companies are talking about establishing global RPO deals, says Terry Terhark, president and CEO of the Right Thing, a Findlay, Ohio-based RPO provider.

"This market may grow quickly through partnering," he says.

Before sending out a request for proposals, Avaya wants to review its staffing operations and make sure it understands what it needs, Gaston says.

The company expects to send out the RFP next spring.