Most IT managers would not think twice about employing recruitment consultants to get the staff they want, but how far should they take the process?

Similarly, human resources is one of the earliest and easiest parts of an organisation to outsource, but how deep does that go?

Should, for example, an organisation effectively outsource its recruitment?

Jeff Wellstead, HR Director of SpinVox, a UK-based company whose products convert voice automatically into text and deliver it as a SMS text, email, blog or to a social network wall or space, did just that.

SpinVox has grown rapidly since its launch in 2003 and Wellstead said traditional recruitment methods just would not have given him the staff, with the skills he needed, in the right timeframe.

"SpinVox was undergoing a huge transformation in growing from 50 UK-based employees to 350 employees over the course of 18 months," he said. "As much as I enjoy recruitment, there was no way I could recruit this many people in 8 countries in that short amount of time."

Staff were recruited across the whole business - operations, IT development, finance, marketing HR and quality control.

Wellstead had experience of outsourced recruitment, but outsourcing on this scale was "a mix of both shear panic and a considered decision," he said. After evaluating several organisations Spinvox called in recruitment process outsourcing specialists Project IT to do the job.

"Using traditional methods of recruitment would require my very small HR team to drop their day jobs, and be on-line and on the phone all day long managing candidates, recruiters and job interview schedules," said Wellstead.

It was not just the volume of work that made the traditional approach impossible; it was the image Spinvox wanted to convey. In normal circumstances, "Even if candidates don't get the job offer, you want them to walk away thinking, 'Wow, what a great company to work for, and I'll definitely tell my friends about the experience'," Wellstead said.

"My team just don't have the cycles to run a full-blown recruitment operation whilst managing their other remits," he added.

Spinvox took steps to ensure it did not loose vital recruitment skills or loose control of the recruitment process by bringing in Project IT.

With Project IT, Wellstead laid out the critical issues for the recruitment process. These included ensuring that Project IT knew how to articulate the "employee experience" and how to support the value proposition of joining SpinVox,

Wellstead was also carful to ensure that Project IT knew how SpinVox wanted to be represented in the marketplace. "Mass recruitment often is the most powerful one-on-one marketing tool available to a young company" he said.