No matter what size of organisation you run, an RPO can deliver excellent value when it comes to recruiting the best talent. RPO stands for Recruitment Process Outsourcing and enables you to have a much more agile recruitment resourcing function whilst increasing the efficiency of the process and improving the quality of the results.

There are numerous ways an RPO can benefit your organisation, and we’ve identified the top 5.

1. Cost Reduction

Many organisations fear the additional costs an RPO might entail but the reality is that one of the major advantages of using an RPO is the ability to significantly reduce your recruitment costs. 

The true cost of hiring is far more than just the recruitment agency fee or the job advert and all of the benefits mentioned here will impact the overall cost. Utilising RPO can significantly reduce the hours spent by one or more employees filtering CVs, arranging, and conducting interviews, assessing candidates, and negotiating starts as well as salaries. almost always going to cost less than doing it all yourself. 

For a small business without a dedicated HR function, this time can be particularly costly as it means employees are not able to spend it doing their day job. This may mean it takes even longer to recruit, further impacting on lost productivity for the business and putting more pressure on existing employees to cover the unfilled role. 

And even for those organisations large enough to have a dedicated HR person or team, an RPO can still save significant costs by reducing the need to employ as many full-time staff to cover recruitment needs. 

Ultimately, when the true costs of the whole recruitment process is considered, outsourcing the filling of vacancies is

2. Improved Quality and Time to Hire

As expert recruiters, an RPO team will be able to find the best quality talent in the shortest amount of time to fill your vacancy. This significantly reduces the productivity cost of having unfilled vacancies in your organisation, as well as the additional stress and pressure placed on existing employees to cover the work of the unfilled position.

In addition, many organisations are more focussed on appointing a candidate quickly (to address the issues highlighted above) than ensuring the candidate is the right one.

Appointing a poor candidate in haste in order to fill the vacancy as quickly as possible is the worst possible outcome as it will result in a huge amount of wasted time and effort as well as having to start the whole recruitment process again.

A good RPO team will have the resources to undertake in-depth researching for the best talent for your role. They’ll also have negotiated significant discounts for all the major job boards as well as any specialist ones relevant to your vacancy. This ensures you’ll be sourcing candidates across the broad spectrum of job boards, not just the one or two you might be able to afford.

Ultimately, this will help ensure you are presented with the best quality candidates in the shortest possible time.

3. Scalable and Flexible

One of the biggest advantages of using RPO is the scalability. An RPO team offers flexibility to align with any peaks or troughs in recruitment requirements within your organisation.

If you only need one vacancy filling on an ad hoc basis, there is no need to employ a permanent HR team.

Conversely, if you’re opening a new department or have a short-term need for a significant number of roles, if you use RPO, there is no need to suddenly increase your HR headcount to undertake the recruitment. As well as the recruitment of HR headcount being a costly and time-consuming exercise in its own right, you’ll also be left with employees who may not have enough to do when the short-term need has been met. 

Therefore, using RPO avoids the huge costs of having to increase the permanent FTE of an organisation for short-term recruitment needs.

4. Consistent and Defined Processes

Whilst every organisation is likely to have their own recruitment process (which will vary significantly depending on size), RPO can deliver a proven and efficient recruitment model on a consistent basis. They will have access to customised tools and systems that enable a more streamlined process, but which are likely to be too cost-prohibitive for many organisations.

This helps ensure you’re attracting the best talent quickly. You’re not going to lose out on great candidates because the hiring manager forgets to look at the applicant tracking system on a particular day or doesn’t have enough time to thoroughly screen candidate CVs. An RPO team will do all of the hard work for you and ensure that every candidate goes through the same screening and interviewing process.

This also means you can truly benchmark candidates against each other and make an objective assessment of the best one to appoint.

5. Analytics and Reporting

Finally, a good RPO organisation should be able to provide as much data and analysis as you want. As we’ve already mentioned, they’ll be using state-of-the-art systems to ensure they have an optimised process. 

This will include tracking and tracing results at every stage of the recruitment process and being able to tell you reasons why an advert may not have worked or why a specific candidate was unsuitable.

You’ll know exact numbers in terms of responses and applications as well as the more detailed insight that provides the rationale for the results.

Many organisations may receive the pure numbers for each stage of the recruitment process, but don’t have the expertise to understand and interpret those numbers in a meaningful way. This is critical to helping fill vacancies both now and in the future in the most cost-effective way.

About Us

We are an experienced Recruitment Process Outsourcer who provide world-class cost effective talent solutions at every level. We create and deliver innovative solutions that add real value in the short, medium and long-term to our clients. These solutions include Executive Search, Recruitment Advertising, Employer Value Propositions, Psychometric Assessments, Careers Microsites, Executive Onboarding Programmes, plus Leadership Advisory & Consultancy services.