Recruitment Process Outsourcing

Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is when an organization turns to a third party, an RPO provider, to find and ultimately hire new employees. The recruitment process outsourcing model is meant to take the bulk of the responsibility of sourcing and hiring candidates off an organization’s internal HR team.

While an RPO provider is finding, screening, and likely even interviewing potential job candidates, the original company is still responsible for making hiring decisions at the end of the exercise. Recruitment process outsourcing works for businesses of all sizes because most businesses do not excel at talent acquisition and it is more effective to get professional help.

Recruitment process outsourcing functions based on the service level agreement that is made between RPO companies and their customers. The service level agreement will outline the scope of the project, the timeline, the cost, and the responsibilities of the RPO provider.

Depending on the service level agreement made with the RPO provider, the provider could be responsible for as much as the entire recruitment process or as little as candidate acquisition and screening.

It is important to discuss your employment needs before committing to a service level agreement to ensure that your organization is getting all of the services it requires from its RPO provider. RPO providers will offer different levels of service and management.

RPO solutions are designed to holistically improve an organization’s talent acquisition pipeline. Staffing agencies are used to fill specific roles and source seasonal workers. Staffing agencies fill an immediate and temporary gap. On the other hand, recruitment process outsourcing is a long-term strategic approach to improving an organization’s talent acquisition process.

There are several benefits to choosing RPO for your talent acquisition needs. The top-line benefits that your company should consider are:

1. Cost Reduction: RPO streamlines your organization’s hiring process, which when implemented properly can significantly reduce your cost per hire. RPO solutions deliver better candidates to your business faster.
2. Promote Scalability: Many organizations face shifting employment needs. If your business requires flexibility and agility when it comes to the size of its internal teams, RPO services deliver an effective solution that can be scaled to meet the real-time requirements of your business.
3. Access to Expertise: Are your company’s internal resources limited? By partnering with an RPO company your business gets access to talent acquisition experts that are focused on delivering high-level candidates and implementing winning strategies. Not only does your business gain access to valuable expertise and experience but it also gains more time to focus on its core competencies and other strategic goals.
4. Access to Top Line Technologies: Technology plays a major role in modern candidate acquisition. Gaining access to these technologies is often incremental and costly when you try to go it alone. However, when you partner with an RPO company, you gain access to the latest recruitment technologies and tools that you might have otherwise decided were too expensive to purchase for internal use.
5. Process Improvements: Beyond the actual leg work of recruitment, RPO providers are beneficial to organizations because they can help you transform the way your business thinks about, approaches, attracts, hires, and retains talent. Are your strategies adequately meeting the demands of your business? An RPO provider can help your organization rethink its strategies to better meet the goals of the business.

These are just a few of the important benefits that come with RPO. Depending on the nature of your business and its goals, there are several other ways that RPO could be beneficial to your organization.

When looking for an RPO provider to handle your organization’s employment needs, there are a few things you should be looking for. First, you should ensure that the company in question is experienced and ideally has experience working with companies in your industry. Recruiting nurses is different than recruiting software developers, and if you are in a competitive talent market, partnering with an RPO that has experience recruiting the type of candidates you want to hire is critical.

Second, you should ensure that the RPO provider you have chosen will take the time to get to know your business, brand positioning, and work together with you in partnership to deliver the results that your business needs. It is vital for RPO providers to understand who you are as a company, your workflow, internal culture, etc. if they are going to deliver top-tier talent that will be valuable additions to your existing team.

Finally, you want to make sure that the RPO provider that you are choosing to partner with is using the latest tools and technologies to improve the entire process. Make sure you ask about the tech stack that your prospective RPO intends to use. Ask questions about how that technology will be implemented and how it will impact your overall hiring efforts. Any prospective RPO provider should be open and honest about the technologies they use to deliver results.

PuzzleHR is dedicated to providing thorough recruitment and talent acquisition solutions to our partners and getting to know their internal culture, employment needs, and business objectives to deliver quality results.