For any business, recruiting the right employees is crucial to achieve optimal productivity and efficiency. It’s also important to select personnel most suited to the goals and objectives of the business. And that’s exactly where the importance of RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) comes in. RPO is one kind of BPO where you, the employer, partner with an external provider who will handle some or all of your recruitment processes. Your RPO provider may use your staff, technology, reporting, etc, or provide all these themselves. Note that RPO is completely different than retained search providers as the former assumes the recruitment process’s ownership, as well as, the responsibility of the outcome.

If you haven’t tried an RPO provider yet, keep reading as the following paragraphs should clarify when is best to use it or when is best to go with a Headhunting approach.

The real importance of RPO

Nowadays, you must go through some critical stages to recruit the right employees – from searching the labor market extensively, using various technologies to instructing hiring managers all the way down to training the candidates. On the contrary, RPO providers, being adept at talent acquisition, can handle all these effortlessly to fulfill your specific hiring requirements. Depending on the requirements of your company, an RPO provider can bring a multitude of benefits including handling hiring fluctuations, minimizing reliance on staffing agencies, lowering recruiting costs, minimizing time to fill, to name just a few.

Should your company use RPO or Headhunting?

Once there was a time when only large companies used to partner with RPO providers because of cost-effectiveness. However, today small and medium-sized companies also started to leverage RPOs thanks to its present nature of being a flexible solution, offering a plethora of additional benefits. As small and medium- sized organizations, have been choosing outsourced recruiting more and more over the last few years, smaller RPO providers have been making their mark in those domains. The key reason is that HR personnel in smaller companies, need to manage many things other than hiring and recruiting – from managing employee training and payroll processing to handling employee benefits. Therefore, it becomes extremely difficult for them to handle the recruiting process effectively within short deadlines. However, these days, you can structure RPO engagements based on your specific needs and pay accordingly, which gives you a flexible, scalable solution to meet your company’s recruitment demands especially on the long run.

On the contrary, RPO solutions often make sense when you can guarantee a large volume of hiring throughout a larger time period, usually 9 to 24 months. So for most businesses, a sharp and effective Headhunting solution, might be more strategic in the mid-term.

Difference between RPO and traditional outsourced recruiting models

Until recently, most companies used to rely on two outsource recruiting models – contract recruiters and recruitment firms. Here are the difference for choosing RPO over these models.

Comprehensive job marketing

RPO providers use different avenues to market client jobs, including social media, job boards, professional networking, etc. to promote employer brand and pick up the right candidates.

Achieving client’s business goals

RPO providers typically invest time to understand clients’ recruitment and/or business objectives. Therefore, they help clients foresee future recruitment needs and offer suggestions on meeting those needs.

Engaging future potential talent

RPO providers, apart from finding talent, develop talent pipelines and talent communities to source talents beforehand and engage future potential candidates.

Assessing and managing candidates

Just like with Headhunting, RPO providers ensure that potential candidates have got adequate expertise and skills required to fulfill specific job responsibilities efficiently. They also help clients manage candidates in every stage of recruiting.

Different methods you can use to engage an RPO

Mainly, there are three types of engagement models that you can choose when partnering with an RPO.

Full RPO

The RPO provider manages the entire recruiting process of an organization from A to Z, including the training stage of the candidates. It practically functions as a department of the company, specialized in the hiring division.

Function-based RPO

The RPO provider manages a certain part of an organization’s hiring requirements such as a particular assignment or department (eg. Hiring regarding IT or Marketing only).

On-demand RPO

The RPO provider operates under a contract that allows it to manage the recruiting process for a predefined number of positions within a specified period of time.

How much should you expect to pay for an RPO solution?

The cost of an RPO solution depends on a company’s specific requirements and objectives, and on the RPO provider. But here are the snapshots of different types of RPO cost models, just for you to get a very approximate idea.

Cost per transaction

The provider charges a fee for performing a certain process.

Cost per slate

A fee is charged for providing a fixed number of qualified candidates for every open position.

Cost per hire

The client pays a fee for every candidate who’s successfully hired through the RPO provider. This option we highly suggest to avoid, as the engagement you might receive from your RPO partner won’t be full. We explain this clearly in this nice article: https://inhuntworld.com/retainer-vs-success-fee/

Management fee

The provider charges a fee for managing a predefined number of positions.

Management fee and cost per hire

The provider puts continuous recruiting effort as per the management fee model and receives additional payments for successful hiring through the program.

Our conclusions

When engaging an RPO provider, ensure that it’ll actually manage its part according to the contract so that you don’t necessarily need to be an essential part of the process. Partner with an expert RPO provider today, develop a robust recruitment process and see how the top talents help take your company to the next level. Allow it enough time so your RPO provider can fully merge into your company’s values and mission, and become your Partner rather than an external vendor.

Are you looking for a long-term RPO partner? Would you like us to help you compare it with more flexible Headhunting solutions?

At InHunt World we can help you with both. We are present in more than 40 countries across the globe, and our mission is to help you scale and grow your business abroad. We believe that Recruitment should never become a hassle, we can guarantee to find you the absolute best talent available, within the agreed timeline. How? By allowing you to focus on what you do best, your business, while we focus on what we know we do best, Hiring Truly Motivated Talents that will bring your company to the next level.

Drop us a line at info(at)inhuntworld.com and we promise to get back to you within 24 hours max. Or simply fill in the form below to get an even faster response.

InHunt World: International Retained Headhunting in 43 countries, worldwide.

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