Including recruitment process outsourcing in your talent acquisition strategy can transform your hiring and business success. While there are immediate benefits to a recruitment process outsourcing program, an increased value is revealed when you engage with an RPO partner in a long-term partnership.
Recruiting is never a one-and-done process. It is an ongoing need, and engaging an RPO provider as a strategic partner over the long term pays dividends far beyond meeting your immediate hiring needs. The value of RPO evolves and increases over the length of your partnership in three distinct steps: immediate cost-efficiency, a longer-term positive business impact, and in the development of an overarching workforce strategy that supports your business needs and goals. Here, we’ll delve into the details of the three steps of the RPO value proposition evolution.
Step 1: Cost-efficiency
Engaging an RPO provider has significant efficiencies over keeping the recruiting process in-house. Recruitment can be easily scaled up or down as your hiring needs require, and outsourcing the recruiting process means that your internal resources are not taxed to fill open positions. Companies that engage RPO providers also see reduced cost per hire and increased efficiency in the hiring process, as RPO firms maintain broad networks of potential talent pools and resources. Additionally, RPO providers allow companies to take advantage of the latest in recruiting technology without investing in any in-house technology development, since RPO providers already have the technological capability that their clients would have to develop.
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Step 2: Business Impact
Once a company and an RPO provider have been working together for a while, the company will begin to see a positive impact on their business. Outsourcing the recruitment process to the experts past the immediate need results in an increase in the quality of the talent pool and increased hiring manager satisfaction and engagement, since the hiring manager is bringing on better people and recruitment as a whole is enjoying a higher rate of success. This increased success, as measured in time spent versus good candidates hired, can also be called optimized recruiting. An additional business impact and benefit of longer-term RPO partnerships is the ability to perform targeted analysis and metrics on hiring and employee performance, so that companies and the RPO providers they work with can discover exactly what kind of candidate works best for the jobs the company needs filled, and how best to find those candidates.
Step 3: Workforce Strategy
In the long term, RPO providers can go beyond providing cost efficiency and business impact to become essential strategic partners, working with companies to create workforce strategies that align with overall company strategy and goals. For example, if a company is looking to expand an arm of their business, they can work with their RPO partner to develop a workforce and recruiting strategy that will cover the talent needs of the new business. Once a company knows that personnel resources will be there when they are needed, the company is free to try new ventures, expand into new areas, and take risks that they would not be able to without the strategic planning and support of their RPO provider.
Each step in the evolution of the RPO value proposition is cumulative. When your RPO partnership has reached the level of business impact, you still receive the benefit of RPO’s cost-effectiveness, and when you’ve begun to develop a workforce strategy, you still have the improved talent pool and recruiting results that you see in Step 2. However, one of the best benefits of RPO is that it is adaptable. Your RPO relationship and its value proposition can be whatever you need it to be. While long-term RPO relationships are the most valuable, your company may find entirely new benefits to creating a strategic partnership with your RPO provider. It all depends on what you and your company need.
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