Bringing new talent into your business can be a tedious, expensive, and occasionally fruitless process. Each time your Human Resources department has to kickstart a new recruiting campaign, several of its other processes get put on hold, and as your hiring team looks for candidates, your existing workforce has to pick up the slack caused by staffing vacancies.

“There has to be a better way,” you may wonder, and fortunately, there is. Enter recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), a tactic in which you work with an outsource recruiting company to expedite the talent search, fill vacancies faster, and unlock a variety of other great benefits.

Here’s everything you need to know:

What Are Outsourced Recruiting Services?

Outsourced recruiting services are a form of back-office outsourcing in which you transfer all (or part) of the recruitment process to an external service provider. Recruiting process outsourcing companies may augment the capabilities of your existing staff with their own personnel, technology, methodologies, and reporting workflows.

Some have the bandwidth to handle everything, finding, recruiting, vetting, and hiring employees, and the best RPO companies even assist with onboarding, ensuring that your newest team member is ready to step in and contribute to the organization from day one.

6 Benefits of Working With an Outsource Recruiting Company

Partnering with recruiting process outsourcing companies alleviates the burden(s) associated with sourcing and vetting new talent. In doing so, you can accomplish the following:

1. Enhance Hiring Quality

Your HR team members wear plenty of hats all at once; they must resolve internal issues, ensure compliance with relevant employment laws, and in between all that, also facilitate efficient recruiting and hiring. That’s a lot to ask of any HR team, no matter how skilled its members may be.

RPO companies, however, are recruiting gurus. Their workers have mastered the art of finding and vetting talent, thereby enabling them to find quality staff on a consistent basis.

2. Boost Cost Efficiency

RPO companies also know how to maximize cost efficiency. Their recruiting operations run like well-oiled machines, meaning you can cut down on waste while still filling key vacancies. More importantly, though, is that RPO providers can scale up or down based on your hiring needs, allowing you to sidestep the fixed costs of building out your in-house recruiting team. 

3. Reduce Time-to-Hire

The longer you carry a vacancy, the bigger the burden it becomes on your current workforce. Carrying openings for weeks or even months at a time also contributes to lost productivity and can hurt your bottom line.

Thankfully, RPO companies help reduce how long you carry vacancies by accelerating the recruiting and hiring process, using the collective skills and resources of their workers to fill your company’s positions faster.

4. Improve Scalability

Gearing up for a major expansion is just one more reason to outsource. RPO companies can quickly adapt to your changing needs, whether they involve supporting a hiring surge or acquiring specialized talent for a new project. Increasing workforce scalability allows you to seize new growth opportunities as they emerge.

5. Access Advanced Reporting

The best RPO companies not only gather detailed insights about the recruiting and hiring process; they also track things like churn and attrition so you can better understand your hiring needs, identify potential weak points in your operations, and improve employee retention.

6. Create a Better Workplace Culture

The recruiting and hiring processes establish an individual’s first impression of your brand and company culture. If they’re notably bumpy, the relationship between your business and that individual will be founded on unstable ground, but if you make joining your organization an enjoyable and frictionless journey, you set the stage for a long-lasting relationship.

In that way, RPO companies elevate your workplace culture; they help you get better at recruiting and hiring while simultaneously ensuring that new employees align with your values and culture.

Finding the Best RPO Companies

There are countless recruiting process outsourcing companies out there, but that can make it tough to identify those that best align with your unique needs. Remember, not all RPO companies are created equal, and not all of them are the right fit for your business, either.

When exploring outsourced recruiting services, make sure that you consider the following factors for each provider:

Reputation

Evaluate the reputations of each RPO company you consider. An organization may be well-known for finding quality talent or somewhat infamous for just plugging vacancies and hoping for the best.

The latter is the far more common outcome, unfortunately, and such companies function more like temp agencies as opposed to genuine recruiting firms. Using temp workers to address short-term vacancies isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course, but it’s vital that you know what sort of talent a company is providing from the onset.

Industry Expertise

Ensure that your partner has worked with businesses in your vertical before, as there are subtle nuances associated with recruiting different types of talent. The process for hiring unskilled labor is much different than the strategy needed to find DevOps talent, for instance.

Scope of Services

Consider how much of the recruiting process you want to outsource, then work to find a provider who offers that precise level of service. For instance, if you want to outsource virtually everything, make sure the company you are considering can accommodate that kind of scope; the last thing you want is to enter into an agreement only to find that your new partner can’t effectively meet your needs.

Scalability

Finally, verify that the outsource recruiting company you choose can grow with your business. Determine whether it typically works with companies of your size or if it is more accustomed to partnerships with much smaller businesses. 

Is It Time to Outsource Recruiting?

Every outsourcing vs. insourcing decision boils down to balance. Consider outsourcing recruiting processes when your internal strategies are no longer supporting the needs of your business.

By seeking out the best RPO companies, you can free up your internal team to focus on their core competencies and provide your business with much-needed flexibility. Moreover, outsourcing providers can evolve with your organization, ensuring they can meet the known needs of today and help you navigate the unknown that lies ahead.