Interviewer outsourcing exists ?

[Andy Jack]

Do we have companies that do the following things for another company (call it client) ?

Get requirements for various jobs for client. Interview candidates that apply for any jobs at client. Selected candidates are directly employed in client, without interviewing by client.
If yes, what are these companies called ?

Please don't say they are called the HR dept of the company :P

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

A good company will not do that. One of the things to interview for is fit with the team. That can't be outsourced. While first level screens can be outsourced (and some recruiters do it), it doesn't replace an actual interview with the client.

[Henry Wong]

Andy Jack wrote:
Please don't say they are called the HR dept of the company :P

Also, even the HR dept of the company won't do this alone. At most, the HR dept will do one or two rounds of culling -- to shrink the list at the beginning. They may do the negotiating of the offer at the end. But HR isn't technical, and won't be the manager that will be responsible for the new hire, so there may be lots of interviews in the middle too.

Henry

[chris webster]

Jeanne and Henry are both right about sensible recruitment practices.

But not everybody is sensible, and what you may see in some organisations is the use of external consultancies to provide temporary staff - even where those "temporary" staff might work on a project for a couple of years. For example, I've seen public sector organisations that used consultancies to provide individual project staff, and interviews would sometimes be conducted without any representatives from the client organisation (i.e. the people ultimately paying the bills). This kind of arrangement may be covered by framework agreements, whereby the client effectively outsources the staffing for a particular project to the consultancy, but it is a very expensive way of recruiting temporary contract staff, as a normal recruitment agency would charge a mark-up of maybe 15% of the daily rate for a contractor, while consultancies typically charge more like 100% of what the contractor is receiving. I never did figure out what the perceived benefit of this practice might be for the clients, as they simply paid twice as much as they needed to and often ended up with less skilled staff, because the consultancy can charge the same daily rate for a trainee as for an expert, so they are highly motivated to place their own cheaper staff in a given role, even if they lack the required skills, rather than hire expensive contractors with the relevant expertise.

Basically, IT recruitment is a real mine-field!