Recruitment process outsourcing, 
or RPO, is a way for businesses to ensure that they can hire top talent without having to maintain an in-house recruiting function that would be costly in time and resources and more difficult to scale up or down based on recruiting needs. For companies who need RPO services, but whose talent needs are not constant, one option is on-demand RPO. On-demand RPO providers make RPO services available to companies on-demand and at-need, instead of requiring that companies maintain a constant hiring relationship with an RPO provider. Since this RPO relationship is more intermittent, but no less essential than consistent RPO, it’s important to vet potential on-demand RPO providers, usually through a test project or pilot program. In this article, based on the RPOA webinar Project RPO: Testing the Water with Project-based RPO by Ray Rike, we take a look at three critical success factors for on-demand RPO programs.
Pilot RPO programs are essentially test runs for a longer-term RPO relationships. They give companies and RPO providers a short-term, low-risk opportunity to find out if they will work well together and if the relationship is likely to be successful in the long term. When companies implement an RPO pilot program, there are three factors that are critical for the program to succeed. These are executive sponsorship, success stories, and change management.
Executive Sponsorship
RPO relationships are not one-and-done deals. When the relationship is done correctly, RPO providers can be long-term strategic partners that contribute significantly to the growth and success of a business, and on-demand RPO providers are no exception. With this potential at stake, pilot programs need to have the support of executive leadership if they are going to succeed. The person spearheading the adoption of the pilot or program can be an executive with political capital, an HR executive who has gained the support of the rest of the leadership team, or the entire C-suite, but regardless of who is at the helm, programs that will affect the performance of the company need to be backed and driven by leadership.
Related eBook: Myths of Recruitment Process Outsourcing
Success Stories
The best way to gain enterprise-wide support and adoption of the RPO pilot and later relationship is to showcase success. Once you have a few successes, such as high-quality hires, you can share the stories through the organization, both officially and through the grapevine. People will believe in a program’s efficacy when they see results and hear how the program created positive change. This change can be through quality hires, how quickly the quality hires were found, or how much money was saved finding these great hires through the pilot RPO program. If you can point to success stories, employees and leadership will be much more likely to get on board with the program.
Related webinar: Setting up for Success
Change management
Creating an RPO relationship, even just through a pilot program, can change processes, workloads, and job descriptions. It’s important to understand what will change, how it will affect employees, and actively guide how the change takes place. If the RPO pilot if forced down a hiring manager’s throat by HR, it’s significantly less likely to succeed than if the company took the time to make sure everyone involved the strategic goals of the RPO pilot, its impact on the organization, and what their role is in making it succeed. Giving employees ownership of the process and managing how the change is presented is essential to having a pilot RPO program succeed.
An RPO pilot’s success depends on a number of factors, but engagement and support at every level of the company is essential for the program to have a hope of succeeding. By ensuring leadership support, developing grassroots company support and engagement by spreading success stories, and keeping employees from being blindsided by the resultant change, companies have a good chance of launching successful RPO pilots that can be the start of a long-term strategic partnership.
