What is Recruitment Process Outsourcing?

Defining Recruitment Process Outsourcing

Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), is a workforce solution that allows a company to outsource all or a portion of its permanent hiring to a third party. With outsourced recruiters often stationed on-site and integrated into the HR or people function of the company, an RPO provider manages permanent recruiting within a corporation.

A talent acquisition team, the newest hiring technology, and adaptable hiring procedures are all implemented by an effective RPO program within an organization.

How is RPO different from traditional staffing agencies?

RPO companies and staffing organizations both assist businesses in finding professionals, but there are several key distinctions between the two.

To find candidates with particular abilities for their clients, staffing companies compete with one another. The staffing company finds a candidate and sends him or her to the business customer. The role of the staffing agency typically stops there.

Staffing companies usually operate on a commission basis and must find several business clients in order to market their services. Additionally, staffing companies are free to pick the roles they think they can fill. A staffing agent may simply give up on a post if it appears to be too difficult to fill and instead concentrate on filling other roles.

Compared to staffing firms, RPO firms are far more involved in the operations of their clients. An RPO recruiter often has one company's hiring requirements as their focus. The needs of the client must always be met by an RPO recruiter. RPO firms do more than just fill open positions at their clients' companies. Additionally, they offer training for new hires and services like recruitment marketing.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing Models

What kind of recruitment process outsourcing solution is ideal for your firm depends on a number of factors. Here are the top five RPO models that are commonly available in the market

End-to-end RPO

This model offers an ongoing solution that includes all services related to permanent hiring, including investments in hiring technology. Although this approach is the most difficult to execute, you may expect the best savings, efficiency, hiring outcomes, satisfaction, and compliance.

Your RPO supplier may give on-site and off-site professionals who work with your hiring managers, process requisitions, locate and evaluate applicants, plan interviews, create and present offers, and carry out onboarding procedures. 

Value-added services including talent marketing, employer branding, internal mobility initiatives, the use of cutting-edge recruitment technologies, and contingent workforce management are frequently developed by end-to-end RPO.

Project RPO

An end-to-end approach is applied to a specific project, such as a new product launch or opening a new branch. Project RPO is an effective solution if you need the benefits of an end-to-end approach for a defined hiring project but want to maintain internal recruitment capabilities for day-to-day hiring.

Selective RPO

Specific areas of your company's internal recruitment process are addressed and strengthened through selective RPO. Many organizations exclusively outsource their sourcing, screening, and candidate management procedures. Best practices are only provided for those particular services with selected RPO.

Recruiter on Demand

With the help of the recruiter on-demand model, your firm can address recruiting surges, new business initiatives, and product launches, or manage certain aspects of the hiring process. Without modifying current procedures or introducing new technology, you can add recruitment capabilities directly.

Contingent Recruiter on Demand

Your most urgent staffing needs are quickly and affordably met by a contingent recruiter on-demand model. For both volume hiring and difficult-to-fill positions, you receive a team of highly qualified experts who can quickly source, screen, and engage top talent.

Services Provided by RPO

Recruitment process outsourcing provide the following services to their clients.

• Workforce Planning: Perfect for predicting hiring needs in the short- and long-term
• Hiring manager engagement: Increases the communication channels between an account team and a recruiting manager
• Strategic Sourcing: Helps to identify the platforms where high-performing candidates are available
• Pre-employment Screening: Thoroughly investigate each candidate's background, employment history, and other documents
• Fresher Recruitment: Can be utilized in the development of outreach programs for recent graduates, internships, vacation programs, apprenticeships, and more
• Talent Engagement: Helps to position the business and its culture so that it can attract the best talent
• Candidate Management: Provides a productive end-to-end service starting with candidate targeting and ending with onboarding
• Recruitment Analytics Support: Assists in the development of techniques and checklists for measuring and identifying the recruitment process' metrics
• Compliance and Risk Management: Assures that all hiring procedures and practices are legal, ethical, and compliant with rules.

Benefits of Recruitment Process Outsourcing

Outsourcing the hiring process is a solution with great potential. This has been supported by the recent expansion of the RPO market. RPO has a certain buzz surrounding it, like with many novel concepts, but there are also several obvious advantages for companies who include it in their workforce planning efforts.

Greater Talent

The fundamental goal of an RPO provider is to guarantee that your company recruits the best permanent employees, especially in competitive marketplaces. An RPO ensures that a company hires the greatest employees by investing the time, effort, and experience in finding, interviewing, and onboarding new permanent employees. In order to have a ready supply of talent available to join a client's company if a new role becomes available, they also establish talent pools.

Businesses must look to passive and underutilized talent pools in order to recruit the top candidates as the competition for talent becomes more fierce than ever. RPO companies have global talent databases and initiatives to find previously undiscovered talent.

Reduced Cost of Hire

An RPO service not only guarantees that you hire and retain the top employees, but it is also more affordable than traditional hiring methods. As time-to-hire, cost-to-hire, and quality-of-hire metrics are frequently used to evaluate RPO providers, it is their responsibility to prevent permanent job openings from going unfilled for extended periods of time. 

Every day that a position is unfilled results in higher expenses and lower output. These unfavorable aspects are kept to a minimum with a completely optimized RPO.

Global Compliance

Despite not being the most interesting benefit of RPO, global compliance is crucial. An RPO makes sure that all hires are in compliance with local regulations because employment rules are constantly changing and it can be difficult to keep track of what is and isn't legal. This is especially crucial when business grows more international. It takes a significantly different strategy to hire permanent employees in India than it does in the US. The experience of a worldwide RPO provider ensures that organizations don't burn their hands while hiring new employees.

Businesses can use the RPO provider's global knowledge to verify that every single permanent employee complies with local legislation.

Increased Candidate Engagement

HR specialists are aware of the importance of candidate engagement. But it's not simple to get the candidate experience perfect. Although important, it takes time and frequently diverts HR departments from their main goals. 

For a business, an RPO provider delivers the knowledge and internal know-how to fully optimize the applicant experience. This affects a company's capacity to expand its market share within its industry and increases its chances of luring top talent.

Better Strategic Insight

Data science is the foundation of any strategic decision.  Even while internal recruitment teams and HR departments are usually aware of this, a number of issues always hold them back.

For starters, technology is expensive, and HR technology frequently falls low on the list of priorities. Second, HR professionals frequently lack the technical know-how required for accurate data analysis. Last but not least, a corporation's data primarily relates to the company itself and ignores the bigger picture.

In all of these ways, a recruiting process outsourcing solution is beneficial. An RPO provider can evaluate previous market and company data to strategically estimate future workforce needs by using the most up-to-date technologies and data analysis skills. Given that talent is the most crucial component of any firm, these insights provide highly valuable business intelligence.

What is the cost of RPO?

The cost of outsourcing the recruitment process is determined by monthly management, placement, and/or project fee. You would normally guarantee a minimum number of hires in an end-to-end solution to give a baseline cost. There is an additional fee for each placement.

Although a project RPO engagement may cost about the same, your supplier might be able to provide you with a more accurate quotation because the scope and volume are clearly defined. Fees for selective RPO can be based on volume (for example, the number of candidates booked for interviews) or a single project (e.g., an employer brand audit). Costs are often less than those of a recruitment agency in any situation.

Final Thoughts

If your company has not yet adopted a thorough talent management strategy, do it as quickly as possible to avoid falling behind as competitors snag the prospects you're after.

You may develop a clear plan for hiring people with the necessary abilities and credentials at all employment levels with the aid of recruitment process outsourcing. You will be able to finish work more quickly and effectively and mobilize people with a total talent management approach, regardless of whether a project or campaign calls for a full-time employee, a temporary employee, a freelancer, or a combination of these.