In today’s competitive business environment, hiring the right people is more important than ever. Companies are constantly seeking new methods to simplify their recruiting processes and hire top talent effectively and efficiently.
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) has emerged as a significant recruitment solution for businesses wherein all or part of talent acquisition is outsourced to an external vendor.
But why are businesses hiring and onboarding talent through a recruitment partner?
- Focus on business: Startups and enterprises may not have the teams, resources, expertise, and defined processes in place to handle recruitment. Moreover, talent acquisition can drive focus away from the core business.
- Cost reduction: Hiring quality candidates can get expensive quickly, especially when you factor in costs for labor, wages, benefits, training, candidate background verification, and job promotions.
- Talent acquisition control: Businesses often hire inferior talent or end up understaffed because they do not have the reach and presence to hire in new locations. What’s more, the absence of passive and active talent pipelines complicates recruitment efficiency.
- Employee turnover: The untimed exit of talent can have severe implications on company profits. Often, the reasons leading to employee turnover are unknown. By outsourcing recruitment to external partners specializing in employer turnover, companies are better equipped to unearth exit triggers and plan in advance.
- Demand for manpower: Fast-growing companies, especially those with global expansion plans or ones that hire to meet seasonal fluctuations, have to move fast in the talent marketplace. Ordinarily, such businesses struggle to keep up with the demand.
RPO partnerships are also common in smaller organizations. With limited resources and spending power available, small and mid-sized businesses would lose to bigger, more-established corporations. Tapping into the recruitment efficiency of RPOs would mean attracting job-ready candidates.
At the end of the day, the rationale for outsourcing recruitment depends on what your business is trying to achieve. If you’ve already made up your mind about external talent vendor partnership as “best for business”, it’s important to first know what you stand to gain from it in the long run before putting pen to paper.
Eight benefits of outsourcing recruitment
Employers who outsource some or all of their talent acquisition are better equipped to cultivate, nurture, and deploy an agile workforce that meets today’s demands while setting the organization for long-term success even in unpredictable times.
But there’s more to recruitment outsourcing than meets the eye.
1. Reduced hiring cost
Companies that outsource their recruiting processes might considerably decrease hiring costs. RPO providers enhance recruiting methods and simplify operations to reduce hiring-related expenditures.
This includes eliminating the requirement for in-house recruitment personnel and slashing talent discovery and pre-screening expenses.
2. Expertise and diversity
Recruiters that provide talent discovery solutions have built their businesses around identifying top talent.
RPO recruiters spend their days in the trenches chatting with applicants, so they have a thorough understanding of the market. They are also versatile in several industries and business verticals, eliminating the need to train a recruitment team on specific job requirements.
3. Resource conservation
Outsourcing companies can assist organizations in unearthing premium talent in record time, effectively speeding up the hiring process.
They may also help organizations limit administrative load.
Since recruitment is a time-consuming process often involving substantial paperwork and administrative chores, transferring it to an external partner frees up resources for reallocation towards other business objectives and pressing matters.
4. Scalable recruitment solutions
One of the most notable benefits of RPO is its scalability. Companies can alter the degree of service based on their changing hiring requirements.
During peak hiring seasons, RPO providers may ramp up efforts to manage the extra workload and scale down as needed, providing cost-effectiveness and agility in response to business demands.
5. Access to a larger talent pool
RPO providers are recruitment professionals who employ cutting-edge tactics and technology to identify the finest applicants.
Their market knowledge and state-of-the-art tools enable them to rapidly sift through the talent pool, ensuring selection of qualified individuals in the screening process.
This expertise leads to higher-quality candidates who are better aligned with the company’s objectives and work culture.
6. Regulatory compliance
RPO providers are well-versed in the legal codes and standards that govern employment, labor, employee benefits, taxes, amongst others.
In other words, their practices are ethical and law-abiding which negates the possibility of infringing legalities surrounding employment.
7. Innovative solutions
Like everything else, recruitment too has evolved over time with the introduction of technology and artificial intelligence.
The key to improving hiring quality and recruitment efficiency is to leverage tools and technology. And RPOs have unrestricted access to such capabilities.
They’re quick to build job descriptions, promote it, shortlist candidates, narrow down the list, bypass unverified candidates, process employment (and the candidate’s personal) documents, release the offer letter, and onboard the new hire.
Automatic job scheduling, SMS marketing, social media promotions, AI-assisted job descriptions, smart Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), to name a few, are just some of the many innovative solutions RPOs possess that can help you get ahead of the competition.
8. Pleasant experience for candidates
Candidates’ concerns sound similar these days, with the most prevalent being poor communication and inconsistent interviews.
Since your recruitment practices and track-record is a significant component of your overall brand reputation, you cannot afford to make blunders.
Collaborating with a high-quality RPO firm allows you to build exceptional candidate experiences, ensuring that your brand reflects it in the process.
In-house vs. outsourced recruitment processes
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The drawbacks of RPO partnerships
Relying on someone outside of the organization to publicize your openings and source people can be problematic in certain cases.
If you want to establish a distinct corporate culture, you should generally keep your recruiting in-house. An external recruiter typically handles numerous partners parallelly and may be unable to cater to your company’s specific needs as opposed to your in-house HR team.
Other RPO drawbacks include:
Cultural conflicts
Although credentials, aptitude, skill, and experience are necessary for filling a position, personality and cultural fit are also key considerations.
When it comes to matching a candidate’s soft skills to the job description, external partners may not have as deep an understanding of your company culture as in-house hiring managers.
Loss of control
Utilizing recruitment process outsourcing services for new hiring entails transferring authority to a third-party vendor. This may seem frightening, but it is a standard operating procedure.
Regardless, disclosing personal or private information to a third party presents some risk. To be specific, you must trust your service provider to implement data privacy measures.
Given the fact that strict security and privacy laws govern users’ digital presence, and the punishment for not respecting them is harsh, the thought of an external talent agency not paying heed to it would raise concern in any employer.
Therefore, the most crucial thing to ask before signing up with an RPO provider is what protections they have in place to prevent any data breaches, as well as their confidentiality rules.
Low-quality hires
Since external recruiters are often paid after candidate placement, they may focus more on filling the vacancy than hiring quality candidates.
Before selecting your preferred RPO partner, find out: how long have they been in business, what is their acquisition and retention success rate, and what do their clients say?
Make sure to read both negative and positive reviews.
Lack of communication
After you transfer talent acquisition control to an RPO, you may not always receive timely updates at every stage. While that is not necessarily a major drawback, it also could mean that things may get lost in translation adding to confusion and miscommunication.
You should request regular status updates and team check-ins to verify that the service provider continuously communicates your brand message and upholds corporate culture.
Metrics and reporting may also fill in gaps and provide a more complete picture of ongoing success without the need for time-consuming emails and conference calls.
Increased time
The RPO team may be better at hiring, but they may overlook fundamental industry insights that are important to your company and the markets you operate in.
Getting them up to speed is vital, but it may take additional time. If you expect to have a long-term and profitable partnership with an RPO provider, include this warm-up phase to ensure they thoroughly grasp your industry’s requirements.
Selecting outstanding outsourcing recruitment specialists: checklist for businesses
Unfortunately, outsourcing can’t improve a pre-existing, inefficient hiring process. If any phase of your recruiting process is still handled in-house, try to improve and optimize it first.
Even the best talent vendors will be ineffective if your process is slowed by lengthy requisition approvals or recruiting managers who make poor hiring decisions. With such hurdles out of the way, the benefits of outsourcing are realized sooner.
Finally, if you decide to outsource talent acquisition, do not sign the contract until the following are addressed.
- For in-office workers, make sure the recruiter has visited and knows the working conditions firsthand. There are various obstacles in different industries, and visiting the actual facilities will assist the recruiter in comprehending.
- To uphold talent acquisition control, go through the job descriptions in detail with the recruiter to ensure that they grasp the main elements to search for. Do not assume that an external recruiter is familiar with your company’s unwritten standards.
- If you employ more than one or two professionals each year through a headhunter, the fees may exceed those of an in-house, paid recruiter.
- Keep communication routes open. Hiring managers frequently adjust criteria during the recruitment process. If you do not communicate effectively, your recruiter will waste important time searching for the incorrect prospects.
- Determine how you will organize your onboarding process. In-house recruiters often manage this aspect of the process. If you outsource hiring, someone from your in-house team will be responsible for processing paperwork and onboarding new hires.
In-house vs. outsourced recruitment benefits
Outsourcing recruitment, unburdening your team
Recruitment process outsourcing is more than just a trend, but rather, a strategic approach that is changing the face of talent acquisition.
Companies that adopt RPO may reap a variety of benefits, including cost savings, enhanced hiring quality, compliance, and better recruitment strategies for workforce management.
As firms traverse fiercely competitive global markets, RPO provides a realistic alternative for meeting changing hiring demands swiftly and effectively.
The right partner for the job
An exceptional recruitment outsourcing provider must be able to effortlessly support the expansion of staff, within or past borders.
Moreover, they must be equipped to handle additional tasks, such as payroll processing, staffing, benefits administration, compliance and risk management, training and development, performance management, employee relations, employee record management, and offboarding.
Employer of Record (EOR) companies like Multiplier specialize in making it easy to hire international talent. Fast-growing companies like DB Results hired exceptional talent in the least amount of time with Multiplier, without any compliance or legal concerns.
There are many other remarkable success stories of aspirational startups and enterprises across the globe who directly benefited from a Multiplier synergy. We want the same for you — tell us your ambition.
