How often has your organisation spent weeks – or even months – interviewing candidates, only to be faced with hiring the best of the current pool of recruits instead of the best person for the position? In an ideal world, you could go back to market and continue looking for an exact match, but more often than not, the position has to be filled.
So, what’s the solution? Do you need access to better candidates, a better recruitment process, or a long-term employment strategy that can plan when you’ll need to fill certain talent roles to grow the business?
For real growth, you need all of the above – which is where Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is adding significant value to businesses across various sectors and industries.
RPO is a business process outsourcing solution in which an employer contracts a third party to manage all (or part) of its total talent acquisition process. Unlike traditional recruitment, RPO providers assume ownership of the design and management of the entire recruitment process and take full responsibility for its results.
RPO doesn’t simply focus on filling a role; it optimises the recruitment value chain by using technology, proven methodologies, reporting and implementing operational efficiencies to ensure tight recruiting timelines are met, the best candidates are hired and successfully onboarded and that employees’ salaries are paid on time.
Let’s take a look at some of the key benefits of RPO:
1. Increased employee retention
When you hire the right people, they tend to stay on. Churn decreases, teams work cohesively and business results improve.
A great candidate doesn’t only have the right skills for a position, however. Values, growth mindset, a cultural fit and behaviour all shape how an employee performs in a given role, and while hard skills are generally easy to measure, soft skills and attitude are not.
According to the Harvard Business Review, “a candidate’s demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than his or her undergraduate major.” Similarly, cultural fit will promote teamwork or create discord and poor productivity.
These attributes are crucial, and yet they’re impossible to determine without the right technology and methodologies. Every business can choose to invest in an HR department that can specialise in recruitment – but this takes focus away from the core business and can be extremely time and cost intensive, which is why outsourcing has become a key differentiator for many businesses.
2. Cost savings
Every day a job remains open, your organisation is losing money in terms of recruitment costs and employee productivity. As we’ve seen, the result is often scrambling to fill a position and then ending up with the wrong person anyway simply because you need somebody – anybody – in the role. One way or another, poor hires leave, which means within a few months you are going through the entire process again.
RPO providers offer a full service for one, predictable cost. This includes measurable costs, such as advertising and recruitment software and subscriptions, as well as the more intangible costs like reducing employee turnover, streamlining onboarding to get new hires up to speed sooner and attracting premium talent to your organisation.
3. Enhanced employment brand and candidate experience
Consider what it means to be known as an organisation made up of top talent. First, talented people love working with other talented people, and they recognise organisations that make that happen. The brand becomes known in the market for attracting top people, which makes it an even more desirable place to work. This reputation is enhanced by clients and the business grows from strength to strength. But it all begins with the candidate’s experience.
RPO providers are completely dedicated to the recruitment process, and as a partner to your business, they are able to sell your business’s vision and mission to prospective employees. They also ensure that candidates do not have a bad experience and that they aren’t left in limbo waiting to hear about the status of their application.
4. Decreased time-to-hire
Your business is growing and you need to hire 60 people for a new location. Perhaps you’re opening a remote office to cater for an international market or you’ve downsized your physical head office and are looking for self-managers who can run client accounts from anywhere. Where do you begin – particularly as you have multiple positions to fill in a very short space of time.
An RPO partner will be able to easily map out how many employees you need, the type of roles that should be filled and then ramp up and hire top quality candidates, even under extreme time pressures. It can be extremely difficult to scale a recruitment process and still keep it consistent and predictable. Similarly, some organisations are seasonal, and need to be able to hire workforces for specific projects.
A focus on the future
Working with an RPO provider like talentCRU reduces costs, attracts better talent and ensures increased retention, without taking the focus away from your core business. For organisations that are focused on the future and building a workforce that can support growth and remain competitive, RPO could add significant value to the bottom line.