Why Should You Consider RPO?

If your organization has to do any hiring whatsoever, an RPO might be right for you. Depending on your situation and the state of your business, an RPO might be more or less useful to you at this time. But it’s always good to know the option is there if you need it.

If you’re not familiar with what an RPO is or what it can do for you, don’t worry. By the end of this article, you’ll know enough about it to be able to make an informed decision about when and where an RPO might be the right choice for your organization.

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What is RPO?

RPO stands for recruitment process outsourcing. You might think that sounds like just hiring a recruiter, but it’s actually more inclusive than that. You see, a recruiter usually only takes over a very small part of the hiring process—such as sourcing, or maybe an initial interview.

With an RPO model, you outsource a large part of the hiring process to the recruiting organization. This can be an end-to-end arrangement, where the recruiting organization takes on practically the whole recruiting process, from sourcing, initial interviews, and scheduling interviews with your people, all the way to extending the job offer to the right candidate, performing background checks, and starting the onboarding process. It can also be a more limited process, where you choose which of the possible services the recruiting organization will perform.

No matter what range of services you choose, RPO is a more in-depth service than a standard recruiter would offer. There may be times when a standard recruiter is a right choice for your organization. But there may be other times when an RPO gives you just the right solution to your organizational situation. Let’s take a look at a few of the benefits an RPO can offer your organization.

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What are the Benefits of RPO?

Whether it’s a full end-to-end solution you’re interested in, or just a more in-depth treatment than a typical recruiting organization would offer, an RPO can offer some serious benefits to your organization. As you’d expect, an RPO can generally offer you savings in cost per hire and reduce your company’s overall time to hire. You might not know that an RPO can actually increase the quality of your hires.

Perhaps best of all, an RPO allows you to scale your hiring capacity to your organization’s current situation, allowing you to fill more positions faster during those high-growth or high-turnover times for your organization.

But that’s enough about generalities. Let’s get into the details of what an RPO can do to improve the health of your organization, increase productivity, and reduce the revenue losses that come from having too many vacant positions for too long.

• Improved Cost Per Hire

When you go with an RPO, you can often save more than 50 percent on your cost per hire. This is because with an RPO you can have a major chunk of the hiring work done before your own HR team gets involved. This frees up your HR people for more pressing work, improving the overall health of your organization.

An end-to-end RPO can take care of almost the entire hiring process. This includes sourcing, initial interviews, scheduling interviews with your hiring people, extending the offer, performing background checks, and running the onboarding process. This all makes for a smoother and easier hiring experience.

• Improved Time to Hire

Time to hire is another major problem for organizations. With an RPO, you can often reduce your time to hire by over 40 percent. This is another way of freeing up your HR team and reducing the revenue losses that come from prolonged vacancies.

Now, that sounds good, but let’s put that in perspective. In most cases, the best candidates are gone after ten days. Considering that the average company has a time to hire of 21 days, anything you can do to improve your time to hire increases the odds of getting the top-tier candidates.

• Better Quality of Hire

In the end, an organization lives or dies by its talent. Improving time to hire already goes a long way to improving the quality of your organization’s hiring, but a good RPO has other ways of improving the quality of your hires as well.

Better hires lead to improved productivity, and they also stay longer. This means a good hire now reduces hiring costs in the long term, filling the position better and more reliably than would have happened otherwise. Through quality hiring your organization gains a lasting competitive advantage, both in increased hiring and through improving your organization’s productivity.

• Adapt to Changing Organizational Needs

When you work with an RPO, you gain the flexibility you need to adapt to the changing situation of your organization. During times when hiring is a low priority, you can back off of the RPO. But in high-growth or high-turnover situations, you can bring in the RPO to move the process along quickly and efficiently.

An added benefit is that you quickly and easily get the hires you need, without having to push your own HR team beyond their limits. This way you never have to bring in more HR staff than you’re going to need on a long-term basis.

How to Get Started?

If you’re interested in working with an RPO, the first thing for you to do is find one. Not every recruiting organization offers an RPO, and not every RPO is end-to-end. When you’re looking for the recruiting organization that fits your needs, make sure to ask about whether they offer an RPO solution.

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The right RPO for you offers an end-to-end solution that takes care of almost the full hiring process, from sourcing to initial interviews, all the way to background checks and extending the offer to the right candidate. If you want to improve the health of your organization, consider letting an RPO take care of some of your hiring needs. You won’t regret it.

Author Bio

Jeffrey Audette is the President of VMG Recruiting, a recruiting organization that offers a full RPO service.

With over 25 years of experience in recruiting, Jeff has partnered with small, medium, and Fortune 500 firms, helping them to find the talent they need.

You can learn more at VMGT.com or contact Jeff at jeff@vmgt.com.

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