Professor Bernard Menettrier de Jollin, Professor for Human Resource Management at UBIS Geneva, presents:

Provision of Human Resources Services: Which Criteria for which Sourcing Strategy?

“We keep core competencies in-house and we outsource non-core activities”.  This radical statement reflects the high pressure from financial markets on many companies, especially the publicly traded ones.  After having outsourced part of their production, helping them to focus on their core competences and market differentiators, companies consider now the strategic value of a set of supporting activities, and envision Business Process Outsourcing.

Human Resource management might be strategic, but is rarely a core competence for companies.  In this respect, one might expect that most HR activities would be outsourced.  The field reality for example in Switzerland shows that HR functions are not significantly outsourced, reflecting gaps with the academic approach.

Professor Bernard Menettrier de Jollin will share the conclusions of his research conducted in 2006.  Based on interviews with leading international corporations, the study identified important elements that are not reflected in the North-American literature and conducted to the formulation of a supporting framework.

Being challenged by external providers, and facing the internal need to make the best possible usage of scarce funding, HR departments may use this framework to define a clear service strategy, and the associated sourcing strategy.

Bernard Menettrier de Jollin is Account Director at Orange Business Services in Geneva. Prior to that, he was Manager and Client Executive at IBM Switzerland for 10 years.

He graduated with a Master of Science in Physics from the Ecole Centrale de Lyon in 1982 and obtained in 2006 an MBA from Henley Management College.

Bernard is Professor for Human Resource Management at UBIS Geneva.