Recruitment Outsourcing Solutions: An Overview

Recruiting has changed dramatically over the past decade. Technology has altered the expectations of candidates while increasing the number of recruiting channels. The landscape is much more competitive, where it isn't enough to offer the best benefits or the highest salary to attract or to retain great talent. Recruiting is now much more than that. If you’re having trouble with your recruiting and recruiting processes, consider one of these recruitment outsourcing solutions:

Project RPO

Project RPO (or project-based recruiting) can be used for recruiting groups of people for a specific area, or as the name implies, for a specific project or operation. It could be the sourcing of talent for expansion, a new department, a sales force or an event. A typical scope is for a certain number of defined hires in a specific timeframe (three months, six months or a year for example).

Project RPO is a great example of how you can leverage an established recruiting team, like the one available from an RPO provider, without having to build an internal team or commit to a larger outsourcing engagement.

Selective Recruitment

Selective recruitment process outsourcing is an excellent recruitment solution if you would only like to outsource one, or a few, recruitment processes. It's similar to project-based recruiting where it's not a complete outsourcing. However, the difference is that you are outsourcing certain processes so that you can focus on the project, whether that's building you employment brand, improving candidate flow, and/or reducing costs. Selective recruitment process outsourcing is customizable, so you can pick the services that are right for your needs while allowing you to utilize the internal resources you have to do what needs to be done.

Recruitment Consulting and Training

If your candidate quality is low, or if your agency costs are too high, or if your internal recruiters are spending too much time on unqualified resumes, then recruitment consulting and training is the recruitment solution for you. With recruitment consulting and training, you aren't necessarily outsourcing any hiring positions or any recruiting processes, but bringing someone in to evaluate and to improve what you're already doing. This is a very good solution for a company that's growing quickly and needs to have solid recruiting processes in place to sustain that growth. This is also a great solution for those who already have robust recruiting processes in place, but want to learn what could be done to be more efficient.

Professional Staffing Services

If you're in a specialized industry, where every position can be a tough-to-fill position, then professional staffing services are the best recruitment outsourcing solution for you. Professional staffing services emphasize the unique needs of these industries and positions, knowing them inside-and-out so that time and money isn't wasted on unfit candidates or vacant positions. This is a very good solution for industries such as engineering, health care, aerospace and defense, and the life sciences.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing

Recruitment Process Outsourcing is defined by the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association (RPOA) as a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer transfers all or part of its recruitment processes to an external service provider. An RPO provider can provide its own or may assume the company’s staff, technology, methodologies and reporting. In all cases, RPO differs greatly from providers such as staffing companies and contingent/ retained search providers in that it assumes ownership of the design and management of the recruitment process and the responsibility of results.

Although recruitment process outsourcing has some variety to it, such as co-sourcing, enterprise RPO, and process accelerators, RPO essentially shifts the responsibility of the processes and the results to the provider. RPO would be a good recruitment solution if the four mentioned above won't work, or if you want to outsource your recruiting so that your staff can focus on other aspects of the business.

Think you need a recruiting solution, but like some help selecting the right solution or right provider for your company? Access the Buyer's Guide, a complimentary listing provided by The Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association to help you search and connect with verified RPO providers.