Rosaleen Blair, chief executive of Alexander Mann Solutions, said that she will manage growth carefully, despite the booming demand for the company's services.

Blair told the Forum she would only take on about five new clients in her recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) business in 2007. Next year, she plans to take on about 11 additional clients.

Ideally, RPO is about taking over the whole of the recruitment function, she said. This would typically be for three years, but sometimes five or seven years.

She said many firms did not have the capability to measure how effective their recruitment activity was. She told the conference RPO was about building a long-term relationship and it was important to negotiate strong commercial frameworks upfront that would "cover all eventualities".

Blair said that providing an RPO service while also operating a recruitment business was a conflict of interest. Last year, Alexander Mann Group sold Alexander Mann Financial Markets to Hat Pin.

She said the firm was unlikely to serve more than one client in a given sector due to the difficulty of maintaining "Chinese walls". For this reason, the group has specialised across a number of sectors.

Blair said RPO helped "pull all the technology together", reduced time to hire and saved clients' money.