When you work with a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider, you hand over all or part of your recruitment to third-party subject-matter experts. The level of recruitment services that they can provide is extensive and can be tailored to you and your business needs.
But how does Recruitment Process Outsourcing work? In this article, we’re going to explain the process along with how this model works differently from traditional recruiting.
The RPO Process
When a business utilises RPO, they first must determine the scope of services that they require. An RPO provider can effectively replace or become your entire recruitment function, and manage and deliver the complete recruitment process on behalf of your business.
However, if you would like to retain your existing recruitment team, you can bolster your recruitment capacity by outsourcing vacancies within a specific department or location or type of vacancies to an RPO provider. Most providers will allow you to configure the RPO service to meet your business needs.
Coverage of the RPO service typically includes:
- Sourcing candidates – RPO providers will have extensive talent pools and databases of candidates already available, plus access to a wide range of sourcing channels to provide your business with a much wider range of talent
- Screening – RPO providers can thoroughly screen each candidate and run any necessary background checks to ensure they are correctly qualified for the job, meet any screening criteria and will align with your company culture
- Recruitment administration support – RPO providers can schedule and facilitate interviews, testing, manage offers including salary and benefit negotiations and feedback to unsuccessful candidates
- Ongoing analysis – your RPO provider will continue to work with you to provide analysis of your recruitment process, including time and cost to hire and retention rates, helping you to improve future hiring.
Even if you already have internal recruiters, you can utilise RPO to free them up to focus on the more strategic hires or key projects. Alternatively, you can outsource these specific types of hires to your outsourced recruitment partner so your team can focus on BAU hiring.
How is Recruitment Process Outsourcing Different From Traditional Recruiting?
When you work with a traditional recruitment agency, it’s likely that they will work with you to fill one or two vacant positions on an ad hoc basis. However, when you work with a Recruitment Process Outsourcing provider, they will become much more involved with your business and work with you on a long-term agreement. They take the time to learn as much as possible about your company and exactly what kind of candidate would fit into your teams and departments.
The role of an RPO provider goes further than just filling vacancies on a transactional basis. They work with you to add greater structure to your recruitment process and ultimately evolve and improve it in the long run, shaping your hiring plans for the future and increasing recruitment success.
The payment structure between working with a traditional recruitment agency and an RPO provider also differs. A traditional recruitment agency is likely to charge you a one-off fee for filling a vacancy. An RPO provider, however, is more likely to charge a monthly retainer to cover a portion of the delivery costs plus variable fees upon the successful start date of candidates.
Benefits of Recruitment Process Outsourcing
Now you understand how it works, let’s talk about the benefits of Recruitment Process Outsourcing and how it can transform your recruitment.
Control Your Costs
By outsourcing your recruitment, you can gain more visibility and control over your recruitment costs – it’s a great way of regulating and tracking all recruitment spend which typically isn’t as closely managed internally. The scalable nature of outsourced recruitment also means that any peaks in recruitment demand can be met without needing to increase your fixed costs. Check out our ‘7 Ways to Reduce Costs by Improving Your Recruitment Process’ to learn more.
Free Up Staff Time
It can be easy for your staff to become bogged down with managing the day-to-day recruitment process when you have roles to fill and in turn, strategic business objectives can be neglected. Outsourcing recruitment allows employees to focus on driving the business forward, whilst the RPO team manage the day-to-day recruitment process.
Stay Compliant
The world of recruitment can be somewhat of a minefield in today’s landscape. Relying on a professional Recruitment Process Outsourcing provider ensures that you remain compliant and up to date with applicable legislation and best practice throughout the process. Without that, you could fall into traps that can wind up becoming very costly, bad for your business’s reputation and resulting in a headache you’d definitely rather avoid.
Access A Wider Talent Pool
The core objective for any business when recruiting is to find the best people for the job. An RPO provider will have access to a much wider talent pool than you are able to tap into yourself, with large networks of potential candidates already within reach, making it much easier and faster to find the right talent for your business.
The cost of replacing a salaried employee is the equivalent of 6 to 9 months’ pay (or even more if they worked in a senior role) but by working with recruitment experts, you can reduce both the cost of and time to hire through this readily available talent pool.
Improve Your Recruitment Process & Experience!
Lastly, a Recruitment Process Outsourcing provider will help you to improve your recruitment process and the experience for both candidates and Hiring Managers. At The Curve Group, we are constantly looking for opportunities to make process improvements based on feedback surveys and real-time data insights.
Need more convincing? Find out more and read our blog on ‘The 8 Pivotal Benefits of Outsourcing Recruitment’.
If you are ready to explore how Recruitment Process Outsourcing can work for you, get in touch with The Curve Group today. We build solutions for our clients from the ground up every time and no solutions are ever the same. Trust our experts to make improvements to your recruitment process from day one, however big or small your requirements may be.
Give us a call on 01295 811 486 or drop us an email on [email protected] and let’s start a conversation.
