If there’s a department that involves knowing your company’s needs inside and out, it’s the recruiting department. Those people need to know which positions are open, who they’ll be working with, the type of person needed in those positions, and the type of person who will fit in with the company. Information and skillsets like that can’t be outsourced, right? Recruiting can be outsourced, but it needs to be outsourced for the right reasons. Here are five wrong reasons to outsource your recruiting functions:
Recruitment process outsourcing shouldn’t be seen as an easy way to dump your recruiting problems onto someone else, as RPO isn’t like other forms of outsourcing. Yes, an RPO provider may be better at recruiting, but if you don’t know why your recruiting isn’t going well, then you can’t expect someone else to deliver as well or better than you can. If you’re not committed to fixing and to improving your recruiting, then outsourcing your recruiting functions isn’t going to make a difference.
Outsourcing your recruiting functions reduces costs by eliminating headhunter fees, reducing the time it takes to make a hire, and streamlining your entire recruiting process. However, you should want to outsource your recruiting to make it more efficient, to improve the productivity of your current recruiting staff, or to allow them to work on other things. This type of outsourcing shouldn’t be seen as a way to cut people from your payroll, as recruitment process outsourcing is a consultative relationship that works with your company and recruiting staff (not just doing their work).
Outsourcing is great when you have too much stuff to do, or if you aren’t skilled in the tasks that need to get done. Even if recruitment isn’t your strong point, hiring only one person a year or every six months isn’t enough to justify outsourcing your recruiting functions either. If you don’t have enough workload to hire in-house staff, then you don’t have enough workload to outsource to an RPO provider. You’re better off to have the owner or a manager recruit who you need.
Although recruiting process outsourcing can help with this because RPO providers have a larger networking to work with, a small network might not be the reason (or the only reason) why your company isn’t getting the quality candidates it needs. Similar to the first wrong reason of outsourcing, if you’re not willing to investigate what’s wrong with your recruiting processes, or to do what it takes to make the necessary changes, then outsourcing your recruiting functions will not help you situation.
Recruitment is much more than that, including everything from the employment brand to the onboarding process, from how current employees feel about the company and why some people don’t stick with the position after a few months. If you don’t perceive recruitment as including all of those things, then outsourcing your recruiting functions to an RPO provider will only cause problems because RPO providers have a holistic approach to talent management. They will look at those other aspects and won’t just find people to fill your empty positions.
As successful as an RPO solution can be for some people, it’s not for everyone, and it certainly isn’t for those who are outsourcing their recruiting functions for the wrong reasons. If any of these reasons apply to you, then you need to rethink what RPO is, or why you want to outsource in the first place.