Internal recruitment teams may have multiple priorities at any one time, and across various departments within the business. The talent landscape has changed over the past two years. In a candidate-led market, there are more choices than ever. This is driven by the rise of hybrid and flexible working models and increased salaries and benefits. Everyone is recruiting from the same, small talent pool. 

​If you’re running a major recruitment drive, internal recruitment teams may struggle to reach the high-level of candidate touchpoints and pace required in today’s competitive talent landscape. Recruiters are working harder to engage with candidates and move them through the recruitment funnel to prevent them from dropping out or accepting a competitor's offer. This, combined with the speed required and higher numbers needed at the top of the recruitment funnel, is creating a perfect storm.

​This could have a significant impact on resource planning resource issues if your team or department has a high number of vacancies to fill and your internal recruitment team aren’t able to deliver the headcount required, or the right quality of hire which could lead to early attrition.

​Leaving seats empty for longer than they need to be can prevent your team from achieving its goals, and increased pressure on your existing team can impact on morale as well as performance. 83% of contact centre workers say they are facing burnout. Those seeing attrition around them are 2 x likely to be looking for a new job*. In these situations, outsourcing all or part of your recruitment can help you meet your headcount targets, relieve pressure on existing staff, resource planning and maintain service level metrics

​What is Recruitment Process Outsourcing, and why is it different?

​If your company has an internal recruitment team, it’s likely that you prefer not to rely on external agencies. They can increase costs unnecessarily,, and sometimes can struggle to really understand the skills and qualities you’re looking for in a new hire. This can make a slower process seem like the lesser of two evils – there’s no point in outsourcing if it means compromising on quality. 

​Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a different approach, which solves many of the problems that your team might face when outsourcing to a traditional recruitment agency. It’s designed to integrate closely with your internal team to understand your business culture, values, and processes, and to replicate the experience a candidate would receive if they were applying directly to your company.

​This high level of integration with your internal systems and your brand means that RPO can be a great way of scaling your recruitment efforts seamlessly when you need that additional resource.  It also provides a number of other benefits to your department and your company as a whole:

• Scalability when you need it

Recruitment Process Outsourcing is extremely flexible. It’s like having an extension of your internal recruitment team on standby.  This means that if your department experiences rapid growth, peaks in demand, or need to implement a new business stream, your HR team can mobilise extra resource that’ll integrate seamlessly with your current processes and help take the pressure off. This means you’re able to fill high numbers of vacancies quickly, with no impact on performance. 

• Free up time to focus on strategy

RPO integrates seamlessly with your existing processes and can take a lot of admin pressure off you or your HR team. By outsourcing simpler tasks to a trusted partner, you’ll free up time and resources to focus on bigger issues affecting your recruitment, such as long-term talent acquisition strategy, employer branding, or employee retention. 

• Expert advice to improve your processes

While RPO comes into its own when the pressure is on, working with an RPO provider can support continuous improvement by sharing up-to-date market knowledge, insight, and trends to ensure you stay competitive in the marketplace. With a team of experienced recruitment experts on hand, you can get advice and ideas for streamlining your internal recruitment processes or improving your employer brand and efficiencies in process cost. This market intelligence can provide quality insight to help your team attract higher quality candidates and fill vacancies faster, with a process that meets today's candidate expectations.

• Reduced time to hire

RPO’s key benefit is that it helps you fill vacancies faster with a process that matches today’s marketplace. By expanding your existing recruitment team, an RPO provider can help you shorten the recruitment process, avoid bottlenecks caused by lack of resources, and onboard candidates effectively so the speed to competence is maximised. This means you spend less time with unfilled roles and can onboard new employees faster to start delivering results. 

• Improved candidate experience

A key area of focus for an RPO provider will be your employer brand. By helping you to deliver a world-class candidate experience, and by communicating compelling reasons to choose your company over competitors, you will be able to attract higher-calibre candidates who will stay with your business longer, thus reducing attrition levels. Speed and efficiency are also key to achieving this, so top performers don’t get another offer in the meantime, with a better candidate experience.

• Reduced costs

By improving the efficiency, speed, and quality of your recruitment, outsourcing to an RPO can reduce your cost-per-hire, and there is also a range of other performance benefits. When you consider the positive impact on your team of filling vacancies faster, attracting quality and higher-performing candidates, and improving employee retention, the expertise, and support an RPO provides could be far more cost-effective than you might think. The CIPD estimates that a bad hire costs a business an average of £8,200 (that figure rises to £12,000 for senior managers or directors).

Improve your department’s performance with greenbean

At greenbean, we’re specialists in Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), and we can work closely with you and your HR team to ensure you meet headcount targets with higher-quality candidates. Whether you need to scale up or down or have a specific project in mind, our solutions fit you and your requirements. 

*Beamery- Workers Want More Flexible Working In 2022 **Customer Engagement Burnout - MaxContact

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