Frequent questions
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is where all, or part, of your recruitment activities are outsourced to an external provider. This sees them act as an extension of your internal recruitment department for all or some of your jobs, typically based on site with you and working under your brand. An RPO could cover:
RPO will see a combination of dedicated experts, technology, best practice processes and analytics embed within your organisation as an extension of your own function. They’ll align with your hiring managers, and work with you to forecast future demand, optimise sourcing, assessment and onboarding.
Leveraging automated and optimised tools and processes, alongside deep expertise, market insight and actionable analytics, they’ll support you to really transform how your business access the skills you need. Making sure you and your business are always at the cutting edge of recruitment.
An RPO may also offer offshoring options to help you reduce your costs and provide you with complete flexibility and scalability to better meet peaks and troughs in demand without additional headcount, all whilst reducing time to hire, improving retention and quality of hire, for better ROI.
Outsourcing your recruitment offers many benefits, including: scalability, flexibility, cost savings, improved access to the skills you need, optimised processes to improve hiring manager and candidate experience and reduce time to hire, talent pools to build your future talent pipeline and increased retention.
Where recruitment and staffing agencies focus on sourcing candidates, RPO providers design and deliver across the full recruitment process. From workforce planning right through to onboarding and retention, an RPO will work as a direct extension to your existing in-house recruitment team.
Your RPO should recommend, implement and run the latest in talent acquisition technology. Support you to develop optimised processes for things like taking in requirements from hiring managers, supporting your business in making informed decisions on assessing candidates and ensuring everything is ready for your new hires on day one.
More often than not an RPO provider will have some staff onsite in your offices. They’ll have people operating on your systems and kit, with company email addresses, so they truly embed and embody your culture.
Every organisation’s journey to externalising their resourcing is different, and no solution ever looks the same. There are seven key areas you’ll need to review to help you decide what is best for you and your organisation; Objectives, geography, types of resources, process, delivery methods, technology and pricing structure.
The best way to reduce the cost-per-hire in high-volume hiring without affecting the quality of hires is by investing in the right RPO solution. Typically, as hiring volumes increase, so do the hiring costs. But this won’t be a problem with an RPO service provider. Outsourcing will provide you with the resources to streamline and expedite recruitment, allowing you to hire talent faster while ensuring the quality of your talent acquisition journey and employer branding.