Spotlight On: RPO Services

In this issue of our Spotlight series, our Global RPO Director Chloe Khatcherian shines a light on RPO, or recruitment process outsourcing, and the value this recruitment model can add.

What is Recruitment Process Outsourcing? ?

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a flexible model in which a company transfers all or part of its recruitment process to an external provider.

Such a provider is essentially an extension of the company’s HR team and can either work on site, embedded within that team, or remotely to deliver the technology, processes, and ultimately the talent a company needs, as well as assist with talent planning for the future.

There are three typical models an RPO can take:

• End-to-end RPO, which encompasses all staffing needs as well as technology investments and value-added services such as employer branding and workforce planning.
• Project RPO, a quick deployment of an end-to-end recruitment solution design to quickly add expert employees to fulfil an urgent or unexpected staffing need, for example launching a new project or team.
• On-demand RPO, similar to project RPO but on a more short-term basis. This model is often sought during spikes in hiring.

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How can an RPO solution help companies?

Finding and engaging the right talent remains one of the top causes of concern for people in the HR industry and given the current climate, it only seems to be getting worse. It’s a constantly changing space as companies adapt their strategies to compete for talent, and it can be hard for HR teams to stay on top of all those market changes when they have many other responsibilities to focus on.

Partnering with an RPO firm allows companies to leverage professional headhunters with a wealth of experience, networks, and success in their fields, thereby efficiently tapping into a much wider knowledge base about the current state of the employment market. This could include aspects such as innovative strategies that are or are not working, trends that could be affecting jobseeker motivation, trends in remuneration offered by competitors, and generally quickly spot where the opportunities lie.

In addition, it allows companies that might not have the necessary recruitment technology, employer branding knowledge, advertising access, or candidate networks the flexibility to scale up and scale down when needed, without impacting their own headcount or having to make budgetary decisions to cover additional technology and other resources.

For some companies, depending on the specific interests and needs, an RPO provider can develop and deliver training for hiring managers so they can make the most of their own recruitment processes, particularly the interviews.

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What kind of companies is it best for?

I think traditionally RPO is seen as something for large companies with volume hiring needs, but that doesn’t need to be the case, I think it can actually work for any size company. We’ve actually developed our RPO model in a way that is can adapt to a client’s needs, whether they want to hire one person or 100 people per month.

For a company to see real benefit from a traditional RPO model though, it needs to be seen as a long term partnership. An effective and efficient RPO team needs time to become fully embedded within the client team, learning and then living the client’s mission, vision, and values while analysing the company’s existing recruitment processes. From there, they need time to help the client optimise the recruitment process, before finally seeing the results of their work and utilising those insights to help the client build a plan for the future.

What’s the difference between RPO and traditional recruitment?

A traditional recruitment process with an agency would typically focus on single roles, or a small number of roles whereas a typical RPO service would encompass the full recruitment lifecycle. Once the team is properly embedded in the client organisation, they would look at all steps in that lifecycle starting at the workforce planning stage, through talent engagement, employer branding, candidate management, hiring manager engagement, interview scheduling, pre-employment checks, onboarding, sometimes offboarding too, and then talent re-engagement to start the cycle again.

An RPO team would also be leveraging their tools and market knowledge to analyse and interpret the data points gained at each stage of the recruitment lifecycle to ultimately deliver more efficiency in the process, helping reduce time-to-hire, as well as cost-per-hire. Ultimately an efficient process has a positive impact on candidate experience, and therefore on a company’s employer brand too.

Though its name includes the word outsource, I actually prefer to think of it as insourcing because our team becomes part of your team, an extension of your HR function that lives and breathes your company mission, vision, and values, and whose goals are ultimately aligned with yours whether we’re on-site or not. The more traditional agency recruitment model is, I think, more like an outsourced solution.

Common FAQ from clients?

It’s come up a few times that clients seem to have an idea that outsourcing this aspect of their HR loses them the visibility and control over what’s going on and some have expressed concerns about what that means for them financially.

Actually, we think it’s the opposite. As I mentioned above, a good PRO provider will have the tools and processes in place to deliver detailed analytics and overview of the wider talent marketplace, providing second-to-none insights on what’s happening within your own talent pipelines, as well as how to remain competitive in the war for talent.

Leveraging this data and knowledge also allows us to advise you, the client, on how to make your recruitment process more efficient from both a time, and a cost perspective, which we know are crucial concerns for most companies at this time. Ultimately you choose to take our advice or not, thus retaining full control over your processes.

When it comes to costs, of course there is a price for using an RPO provider, but for a company to set up an entire in-house recruitment operation from scratch, it can be pretty expensive. Do you want to hire generalist recruiters who can cover all your roles, or specialist recruiters per role type? Both come with pros and cons, and potentially hefty price tags depending on their experience. Then there’s the tools and technology such as sourcing channels (LinkedIn, job boards, other forms of advertising), an applicant tracking system (ATS) or CRM, recruitment agency costs for the roles the internal team doesn’t have experience in covering (which we typically see with niche or senior profiles).

Bringing all those facets of recruitment under one expert provider, as I’ve mentioned above, reduces time-to-hire and cost-per-hire through benefiting from economies of scale and the expertise of professional headhunters with a wealth of experience, networks, and success in their fields.

Ultimately the cost of an RPO solution depends on the scale of the project and which model is used and it’s therefore hard to put an authoritative figure on it so if you’re wondering about your options, it’s best to contact our RPO team to get a real understanding of how it can help your business.

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If you’d like to learn more about our RPO services, please feel free to reach out to me here on LinkedIn, or contact us here via our website.

In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for our soon-to-be-launched Definitive Guide to RPO Services! If you want to be among the first to receive exclusive access before the guide goes live, sign up here .