2020.06.19
Today, I would like you to meet one of the most essential members of enPower, Jason Bonitsky. He decided to take a new challenge of his career in enPower, RPO Division of en world after 12 years of great contribution as HR Recruiter and Senior Manager.
Why did Jason take the path?
Please tell me about yourself, Jason.
I joined the company that would become en world Japan (Wall Street Associates) back in 2007 as a consultant in the HR Recruitment team. I had never thought about a career in recruitment, but I loved that a job well done resulted in a "win-win-win" for the candidate, the client company, the consultant. Now we call that obsession with creating wins "enabling success."
What attracted you to join enPower?
I have been lucky that every time I feel I have hit a plateau in en World I find a new challenge. At the start of 2019 I was managing a team of 26 recruiters and we were creating a lot of success... but for the first time I felt something might be missing. Talking to candidates and clients as an HR recruiter, I knew that the Talent Acquisition (TA) function was going through a huge transformation. One of the major drivers was outsourcing of the recruitment function and the growth of RPO. While Japan was behind in this trend, I saw my HR clients struggling to meet the demand to create a direct sourcing TA model. At the same time, people from an agency background were struggling to transition to inhouse recruitment and balance stakeholder demands with an agency mindset. I remember thinking, "Japan needs a win-win solution for TA that combines the strengths of internal recruiters and the skills and capabilities of agency recruiters." Then suddenly I was given the chance to help build that exact platform in enPower in the start-up of our Japan Sourcing Center (JSC), which would become both the engine for enPower's direct sourcing capability, and the academy for our future generation of enPowerians.
What are some experiences that you didn’t expect to gain?
It took some time to change my mindset from that of an external consultant to be an internal partner. As a consultant, I loved the "art" of making successful placements, or hires - and I especially loved working on "hard" searches where that eventual "win" would feel all the sweeter. Honestly, in RPO there isn't really time for that sort of romantic approach. We spend more time on the "science" of recruitment and improving hiring processes to get better results for our clients. I have spent a lot of time with our Data and Analytics team, not only to understand how we are adding value now, but also to find ways to further improve our service and become more efficient. In the JSC we've experimented with AI sourcing tools, the entire suite of en Japan products, and built our in-house database from scratch so we have a pool of qualified candidates for our onsite recruiters. We have focused on understanding the most common roles that arise at our clients and focus on the right sourcing channels. That way we can create repeated success and improve key TA metrics like reducing time-to-fill for open roles and optimizing recruitment spend.
Why would you encourage others to join enPower?
I'm biased, but I believe we are building the best RPO in Japan. When I talk to clients now, I can see the opportunities for us to add value and make improvements to their TA function, whether we are doing a full end-to-end outsource or single staff augmentation.
It helps that we have great people, from our HQ support staff to our Delivery Managers and Onsite Recruiters, to the high potential members in the JSC. There are common values with our en world colleagues, although I feel that people in enPower are a little more focused on collaborative success with the client and team rather than individual billing success in the agency side.
Finally now that I’ve just started up again in the new BD role from this month, I am really excited for a chance to reconnect with clients and HR professionals who want to solve some issues or problems in their TA team. Since we are a Japan-based business, we can build a custom RPO solution to enhance the results at our clients.
Of course, that's only part of my motivation: the other half is to grow our business so our JSC graduates can show what they have learned as the next generation of our onsite staff!