Hiring the right people for your organization is a challenge. Maintaining a dedicated in-house recruitment team is expensive, and unless your business has more than 200 employees, it may be overkill. Even if your organization is large enough to support an in-house team, how do you know if they’re using the best strategies to bring in the talent you need most?
That’s where recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) comes in. RPO vendors not only let you outsource your hiring operations, they collaborate with you to design a comprehensive recruitment strategy, and implement it using cutting-edge, evidence-based tools.Here are some ways they can help your business attract and keep the talent you need.
Integrated Strategy
Staffing agencies, headhunters, and hiring contractors can be useful resources for attracting/identifying/interviewing potential candidates, but they aren’t an integrated part of your business plan.
RPO is different. When you choose to outsource your recruitment function, you create a partnership to drive your organization’s growth. The vision you create together will impact every aspect of your business by stating clearly who you want on your team and how you will attract and hire them. Your RPO vendor functions as part of your core team, not only acting on your direction but bringing experience and expertise to your analysis.
Successful RPO partnerships empower businesses to think of recruitment as a crucial element in their overall plan for success.
Evidence-Based Tools
How does an RPO vendor achieve better results than an in-house team? By creating processes and tools that are grounded in rigorous research.
Thanks to the automation of HR records, there are enormous quantity of data available about who applies, is hired and subsequently thrives (or crashes in flames) in organizations of every size and kind. Aggregated and scrubbed of identifying individual information, these records show researchers which candidates are likely to succeed in each type of organization. They show what interview questions and answers are useful predictors of future success. They even show the most common pitfalls in retaining new employees once they’re hired.
It’s your RPO vendor’s job to stay abreast of this research, and to make sure your organization’s recruitment strategy and all its associated tools and processes are firmly grounded in it.
Continuous Improvement
Recruitment process outsourcing isn’t a one-stop shop. As your organization grows and changes, your recruitment strategy needs to keep up. Your company’s culture may remain stable or it may change as it grows. Your need for well-rounded generalists on your staff may be replaced by a growing need for highly-specialized staff in specific areas.
Your RPO vendor will make adjustments to your overall recruitment strategy to reflect changes in your organization’s needs and will provide you with real data about the strengths and weaknesses of your current strategy’s performance.
Neutralized Bias
Traditional recruitment models make it easy to discriminate against strong candidates without even realizing it.
Recruitment process outsourcing lets you capture these applicants for your interview pool by taking subjectivity out of the process as much as possible. Electronic and other screening tools prior to the interview stage ask candidates about their skills and experience, as well as more personal questions like:
- What motivates you to work harder?
- What kind of work environment helps you stay focused?
- How do you respond to disappointing feedback?
- How hard is it for you to speak up in a meeting?
These preliminary assessments help your RPO vendor determine whether a candidate will be happy in your organization, or on the team where you have a vacant position. Your RPO vendor will base their hiring practices on this kind of data, not on subjective preferences about gender, race and age.
Organizational Culture
Your RPO vendor will need to understand your organizational culture as part of developing a recruitment strategy for you. This means you will have to think carefully about it, too. Is your company a welcoming environment for the kind of talent you want to hire? Has your organization’s growth made it difficult even to define your culture?
Your RPO partnership is a golden opportunity to take stock of your organizational culture, identify any weaknesses and capitalize on its strengths. Your RPO vendor can suggest targeted improvements based (again) on data about your industry and organizational size. Many businesses ignore the question of culture, dooming them to high employee turnover. Your RPO partnership will encourage you to prioritize it.
Efficiency
Common sense dictates that the most efficient way to accomplish a task is to give it to the person who is best at it. Recruitment process outsourcing is no different.
As specialists in a rapidly changing business area, RPO vendors build their reputation on doing one thing very well. This is how they add value to your organization. Are you looking into adding contract or “gig” employees to your workforce in some capacity? Are you expanding into overseas markets or trying to establish market share in communities that speak other languages? Do you want to hire people to work from home?
Any one of these challenges can slow down an in-house recruitment team that has never faced them before, while your RPO vendor can take them in stride.
Recruitment process outsourcing is a tool whose time has come. As organizations become more flexible and responsive to market and customer feedback, recruitment practices must become similarly agile and creative. By engaging a reputable RPO vendor to bring aboard the first-rate talent you need, you benefit from their specialized expertise while simultaneously freeing your own energies for more immediate operational and strategic goals. Hiring the best people isn’t going to get simpler any time soon. Why not let a team of experts take your organization to the next level of recruiting excellence?
