According O’Toole, Virginia Commonwealth University Professor of Economics, “Conditions in the labor market have improved in the first 10 months of 2014. In the first 9 months of 2014, private payroll employment improved by an average of 220,000 per month, up from 190,000 jobs per month in the same period in 2012 and 2013”. This created a more competitive environment for the labor market and allowed employees to have more confidence in jumping from job to another, creating recruiting challenges for employers.

Are you plagued by recruiting challenges that seem impossible to overcome? Do you know that your recruiting short comes are affecting your company’s productivity and bottom-line but can’t quite identify them? You’re not alone—the recruiting industry faces many challenges on a daily basis, but we’re here to help. In a recent RPOA Leadership Forum webinar, Novotus’ stellar recruiting team discuss and tackle the top four biggest recruiting challenges of today.

In recruiting, the one thing that matters is the hire. Technology, management, resources, and experience are important and can make a difference in whether or not there is a successful hire. But the hire is what matters because it's why you have an RPO solution and its why you begin your recruiting process in the first place. Great hires with your RPO solution mean RPO success, and there are things you can do as a buyer to help guarantee that success. Many of those things actually happen before RPO service agreement is solidified, so here are few suggestions to help guarantee a successful RPO relationship.

In part one, Recruitment Process Outsourcing in its Infancy, of this three-part series, we covered the recruitment process landscape as it existed 10 years ago. Back then, many HR leaders and companies were not comfortable with outsourcing and needed to be educated on what RPO was. Also, some of the first RPO providers needed to prove that this solution worked and was better than the other recruiting solutions that existed. Now, in the second part of this series, we explore what the landscape is today and what RPO means for buyers, providers and results in 2014.

Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) as a business discipline was founded about ten years ago. Since then, a lot has changed and evolved in the industry including services offered, delivery methods, buyer-provider relationships, and the players in the market. RPOA has recently partnered with the Outsourcing Institute (OI) on a webinar that covered RPO history and evolution over the past 10 years. Moderated by OI founder and CEO, Frank Casale, the dynamic discussion included representative from both the RPO customer and provider community. RPO providers represented by Mike Mayeux, Novotus CEO and RPOA President, and John Younger, Accolo Inc., CEO and RPOA Past President. RPO customers represented by Mark Baudler, Sr. Manager, HR Services and Processing Improvement, Panduit, and Kipp Sassaman, Vice President Human Resources, Fikes Wholesale, Inc. In this 3-part series, we cover the 3 chapters of the discussion: RPO past, present, and future. View webinar. 

RPO in the Beginning

In the beginning, there were two types of RPO provider: those that did high volume, low complexity work and those that did low volume, high complexity work. Many HR leaders weren't comfortable with the idea of outsourcing their recruiting, although a few major companies were willing to take the chance and give the idea a try. In fact, a large majority of leaders would have cautiously considered the idea at best. Some would have rejected the idea outright, while a small number would have been openly supportive of the idea of outsourced recruitment.

"In those early days, it was a very interesting marketplace being an evangelical marketplace," said Mike Mayeux, CEO of Novotus. "You had to educate every buyer as they came along."

John Younger, CEO of Accolo, explained that in the early days of RPO many of the projects were projects that the recruiting agencies and contract recruiters failed on, or were the projects that no one wanted. One of Younger's first projects was to find a parasitic engineer for Texas Instruments, but specifically someone who was born in India, educated and trained in the United States, and who wanted to return to India. Younger found this person, pointing out an accomplishment that RPO is uniquely capable of achieiving.

Calculating your recruiting costs isn't as easy as you may think. It's not a matter of how much money goes into filling positions, but it's also the revenue lost because of unfilled positions. These computations aren't as straightforward at first glance when you consider efficiencies and how costs themselves are determined. Knowing how to make the calculations can make a huge difference in the resources that go to recruiting and how recruiting impacts the bottom line. Here's how to calculate your recruiting costs and to use the right data to determine the business impact of your recruiting.

Organizations understand the importance of talent acquisition. Their assumptions about it's importance, albeit accurate assumptions, reflect the need to act on these beliefs but not necessarily how to act on these beliefs. Great talent is key to a company's competitive advantage, and is central to achieving business goals, but the hard part is understanding these assumptions enough to make the right decisions regarding talent acquisition. Here's how to understand these assumptions in a way that illustrate the business impact of recruiting, and how to get the resources you need to acquire the best talent:

Have you ever thought of all the steps involved in a recuiting process? Jen Illif, Vice President of Marketing with Novotus, outlined more than 20 different steps of recruiting in a recent webinar presented as part of the RPOA Leadership Forum series. What are these steps and why would outsourcing some or all of them be a good solution to your recruiting needs? 

Recruiting can be challenging for a lot of companies. But, for large companies, or companies experiencing a lot of fast growth, recruiting can be even tougher. With so many open positions to account for and talent to source, things can easily become inefficient as people and positions slip through the cracks.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is relatively a new industry but a very lucrative one at a billion dollar valuation by Staffing Industry Report. But, what is RPO anyway? According to this article by Bryan White with Novotus, “RPO means different things to different people”. Different companies hire RPO providers to solve different kind of problems. What RPO means to a company depends on their unique needs and requirements.