‘What’s in the box’ when you invest in a Recruitment Process Outsourcing provider?

Sep 24, 2021 | Total Talent

4-minute read

Recruitment Process Outsourcers (RPOs) are companies that outsource the recruitment function for employers. Often, RPO outsourcing partners will bring onboard a dedicated on-premise team to fulfill recruiting activities; hopefully possessing a heady blend of industry and recruitment knowledge, served up with a passion for people, customer service, and for achieving partnering outcomes.

‘The Job’ these companies do it to take care of the hiring process on your behalf. While some companies cover both Full-Time AND Contingent Workforce needs, others specialize in one or the other. Expect modern RPOs to offer a choice of onsite or offsite operations, so you’ll need to decide if you’re looking for someone to operate from your premises or remotely.

Benefits of Recruitment Process Outsourcers (‘RPOs’)

The benefit of an RPO is that you can measure results as the provider is assigned the end-to-end responsibility of finding the talent you need. This means you can scope the RoI of your provisioning based on key metrics such as time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, etc.

  1. Cut costs

A prime advantage of an RPO is its cost effectiveness. RPO providers have the resourcing profile that enables them to scale up and scale down to match the fluctuating hiring needs of clients. providers are commonly measured on cost, quality and time to hire.

  1. Better-fit talent

Expect your RPO to invest their time, energy and resources into sourcing, screening and presenting the best available talent. They may also ‘land’ with immediate access to a large talent base profiled around your industry or skill requirements.

  1. Scalability

RPO providers have structures in place to adapt to any situation.

  1. Reduced Time to Hire

It’s becoming increasingly more common for RPOs to employ industry expert recruiters with a rich knowledge of the talent pool you need. Tight time to hire deadlines are a fact of life in recruitment. Thankfully, International RPOs like USTECH SOLUTIONS can call upon onshore and offshore recruiters to provide a 24/7 recruitment engine for your business, with reach beyond your shoreline to talent anywhere in the world.

  1. Talent Pooling

Another key role for an RPO is to sift through applicants and present the client with the best people for roles, dramatically reducing the management capacity overheads created by recruitments.

  1. Process Design

RPO providers will normally fine-tune the recruiting process so that it is consistent across all departments. Simplification of processes makes it easier for management to understand recruitment performance at any given time.

  1. Transparent Analytics and Reporting

RPOs will track and trace stages of the recruitment process, installing real-time reporting for prompt decision making. The better RPOs will focus on Actionable Insights, i.e., ‘so-what’ data that encourages actions to be taken to improve performance.

  1. Enhanced Stakeholder Engagement

RPOs exist in the ‘people business.’ Good program managers will engage frequently with hiring manager and senior leadership teams.

  1. Supporting policy compliance

Expect your RPO partner to supply deep expertise around labour laws and standards. New additions to the list of policy and compliance include data security and privacy data governance ‘by design.’

  1. Extending talent sourcing routes

Your RPO assumes responsibility for finding the candidates. They can help you to embrace social media channels to directly source the talent you need, so you don’t have to pay so much in agency fees and on paid advertising. The need to regularly advertise via costly outlets is eliminated.

Operating models

Most RPOs will supply their own technology and operate their own processes although increasingly, (because of data security and privacy concerns, not least risk of IP leakage) procuring organizations are seeking more of a blended approach where the partner works with existing tech platforms and embeds their activities into incumbent processes.

Sometimes, this is described as a Facilities Management Service—or FMS for short. The advantage of this model is that your outsourcing provider will adopt the same systems, policies and protocols that are already in place, and will simply offer up the know-how and resources needed to satisfy your recruitment demands.

No two RPO vendors are the same

Demands for more flexibility in the talent sourcing arrangements of employers has led RPO vendors to offer more flexible ‘pick-n-mix’ service options. This means procuring organizations can be picky as to the type of relationship they’re looking for, and what aspects of the recruitment life-cycle they’re looking to outsource.

Technology platforms are now an integral part of an RPO

Whilst you might want to insist that an RPO vendor embraces the technology ecosystem you’ve already invested in, there is a case to consider the technology options that RPOs can supply. The recruitment industry is highly competitive and RPO vendors are under constant pressure to innovate and provide a competitive advantage to their clients by offering them access to the very latest technology. Examples include technology tools that surface market rates for job roles, that provision direct sourcing and Statement-of-Work contracts, or that create micro-task markets to open doors to gig workers able to deliver your projects.

A key benefit of having your RPO equip you with their recommended leading edge technology platforms is that your contract arrangement can still be framed around business outcomes, not simply the supply of clever tech tools that may or may not deliver a business return-on-investment. Should investments not lead to promissory returns, then with appropriate contractual clauses, procurements can be prematurely cut short.