RPO is on Fire
The answer is of course, recruitment process outsourcing or RPO. The Staffing Industry Report estimates RPO as a nearly $1.5 billion market and projects that the market will experience some serious future growth. RPO offer some great benefits for companies, like speed, efficiency and the economies of scale. Companies may not be able to achieve the kids of results they’d see by outsourcing their recruiting function.
Some companies outsource their internal recruitment function for a portion or all of its jobs. Benefits of RPO provide scalable growth for smaller companies, complete with technology, staff, methods and reporting. This makes evaluating RPO vendors much easier to Talent Acquisition Directors. If the relationship with an RPO provider is managed well, all facets of a company’s talent management function can see improvement from the quality of the candidate pool to governmental compliance.
While corporations weren’t always enthusiastic about outsourcing all or even some of their talent acquisition function, RPO providers have grown bolder and larger and more effective. In the past few years, the primarily North American centric RPO world has bled out of the borders, mainly due to mergers like Allegis Group Services ?nd Talent, Pinstripe ?nd OchreHouse, ?nd SourceRight Solutions ?nd Hays. Add to that, the emerging needs for a temporary or contingent workforce, which create a need for an organization to scale up and back almost quarterly, in some cases monthly.
The main difference between conventional recruiting and RPO is that the latter assumes possession of process while the former is just a part of the process being handled by the company.
Jennifer Olsen, a blogger over at Spingboard HR, recommends that businesses ask themselves these three questions before getting involved with an RPO provider:
- Are your hiring efforts working? Where are the breakdowns in the process?
- How much control do you want to have over your search efforts?
- Which pieces of the search process do you most need help with?
She also gives a great list of questions to ask of your potential Recruitment Process Outsourcing company. So what are the downsides of outsourcing your recruiting? Hmmmm let’s see….there are two main concerns:
The first lies with management. Who’s really in charge when you give over an entire function, process, staff and tech to a provider? Much like any other business process, the contract must be crystal clear about metrics, management and what to expect when a company enters into an agreement. With the RPOs getting extremely large, it’s imperative that managers maintain talent acquisition buy-in.
The second issue is the cost. While the costs are flexible, allowing companies to save thousands in theory, you can imagine that is not inexpensive to essentially hire an entire department and get new technology and operations to boot. There are companies who simply cannot afford RPO at the time when it’s possible they need it the most :
RPO involves excess expenditure meant for staffing transactions. The total amount may exceed the actual costs of inhouse recruitment. Overall, outsourcing to parties may pose a considerable challenge concerning management. It may turn out to be successful or unsuccessful depending on the adequacies of the organization. Thus, an inappropriately executed RPO could also lead to diminished recruitment efficiency.
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