This is a guest blog from Neil Purcell, Founder and CEO, at TalentWorks. As part of our Recruiting Weekly Series, Neil shares his thoughts on outsourcing recruitment
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The demand for top talent is soaring, and sometimes this means that a little help is needed to reach and recruit top talent. RPO is the abbreviation for Recruitment Process Outsourcing, and refers to using an external provider for parts of your recruitment. This means handing over parts of, or all of your recruitment processes to a third party.
What’s great about RPO is that it can be flexed to suit business needs. This is perfect for scaling businesses that need to hire at speed and more established names looking to build new teams or manage growing recruitment efforts.
With the prospect of a looming recession toward the end of the – businesses have to think even more carefully about attracting quality candidates. Hiring is now a multifactor problem, and leaders implementing talent acquisition strategies should consider an RPO to tackle their recruitment challenges.
Here are 5 Reasons why an RPO is the most flexible recruitment model:
It can be a short or long-term commitment, depending on your needs.
Finding an external recruitment partner may bring to mind visions of long-term contracts and set-in-stone partnerships. Outsourcing recruitment seems like a huge commitment and one that many scaling businesses cannot commit to when managing the uncertainty of business growth. However, with more agile and flexible RPO models available, which are more suited to scaling businesses, RPO is becoming more accessible for everyone.
RPO providers often have an embedded recruitment solution. They will provide recruiters who embed themselves into a business to allow them to understand it from the inside. Being within the team gives them a more thorough understanding of the company culture and what type of candidates will fit well.
Additionally, most companies don’t need to hire constantly throughout the year and there will inevitably be some slower months, and the budget will be better spent elsewhere. The length of time you have an RPO is entirely determined by a company’s needs. It can be a successful long-term solution, but it can work with shorter, one-time recruitment campaigns to ramp up hiring and fill vacancies quickly. An RPO is a highly specialized process that can flex to meet your needs, however long or short they may be.
It allows companies to focus on growth and success, not just recruiting
Unlike contingency recruitment agencies, whose services are often used on an ad-hoc basis when the position is hard to fill or time is limited, a flexible RPO is a partnership. RPO means experts integrate within your business and become an extension of your team, working towards long-term goals and carrying out large-scale recruitment projects which align with your business strategy. As well as helping with urgent hires and facilitating demand, they can also focus on more tactical elements of recruitment like employee value propositions, talent brands, and digital attraction campaigns.
In turn, the value of a flexible RPO relationship for our business is that it allows businesses to focus on growth and success, not recruiting. Future-proof, flexible RPO models allow for an ebb and flow in talent acquisition that can cater to the changing needs of a business, even amid a time of continuous change.
It’s a great way to retain your own internal recruiters
Perhaps one of the biggest advantages of RPO is that it’s a great way to retain your own internal recruiters as it’s so effective at providing that extra level of temporary help they can’t find elsewhere. Despite the fact that the Great Resignation may seem like old news, people are still changing jobs at an unprecedented rate, and this includes HR leaders and talent acquisition specialists. It’s a business-critical, showstopper issue that is really threatening business growth: if you can’t even retain the people who are meant to source candidates, how can you continue to recruit at all?
It’s time to get realistic about the scope, bandwidth, and capabilities of your talent team. Can they source and process the number of roles you are looking to source over the next six months or the next year, or will they burn out in trying to do so?
In this situation, RPO can act as another layer of support for your talent acquisition team, helping them to flex and meet the demands of today’s hiring landscape. In addition to helping talent teams tap new talent pools, RPO can assist across the entire process of advertising vacancies, sourcing candidates, taking the time out to screen or interview, and even negotiating salaries.
It can cut overall costs
RPO is often thought of as an expensive way to outsource the hiring process but the truth is, it’s often much cheaper. Although it depends on the tech recruitment project you’re undertaking, forming a talent partnership with an RPO agency often makes recruitment less expensive in the long term. RPO recruiters are able to pipeline talent, build your employer brand and work on strategic ways of reducing hiring costs rather than just hiring for one available vacancy.
Often, RPO providers provide better quality hires and reduce employee turnover which reduces costs in the long run. Plus, with faster, more precise sourcing capabilities, the cost to advertise for specific vacancies will be significantly reduced. RPO recruiters can reduce hiring time and ensure your business remains as productive as possible throughout the hiring process.
RPO may help you find better, more diverse candidates
Many companies are stuck in a rut of hiring only within their contact pool, which may lead to a business that isn’t flexible enough to meet the changing needs of today’s uncertain business landscape. RPO can often be the antidote to this, as it can help businesses to discover new candidates they may not have had access to in the past.
Through talent mapping, RPO leaders are helping businesses to scour the market by identifying the top talent in a given field, even if the candidates don’t fit into the usual stereotypical profile or pool a business normally hires from. Sometimes it takes an objective, third-party point of view to see where something different may be just what a business needs.
RPO providers are often specialists at sourcing candidates better suited to your business. Their embedded recruiters will get a better feel for the company by undertaking the onboarding and talking to people internally. This can help inform their search and lead to them finding better quality candidates.
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All of the above are equally crucial benefits to how a flexible RPO can transform your recruitment processes for the better. Businesses simply can’t afford to take a passive approach to recruitment right now – especially as we keep an eye on a looming recession later in the year. We need to work smarter to attract the best talent who will stay for the longer term.
Author Bio:
Neil started Talent Works International 11 years ago with a handful of employees, since then, it’s grown into a global business. Neil is passionate about finding talented people to help entrepreneu
rs realise their visions and solve talent attraction problems for tech companies of all sizes. Neil has supported both established and scaling tech businesses to deliver recruitment
strategies across the UK, Europe and the US, supporting founders, boards and teams, to hire thousands of talented people around the world. Talent Works International works with fast-scaling tech companies to hire great talent and build agile, embedded recruitment models that adapt as the organisation’s talent acquisition demands change and evolve.
