What is Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) – A Complete Guide

Introduction About RPO

Recruitment Process Outsourcing is the outsourcing of all or some of the hiring activities of an organization. It involves collaboration with an external provider who will manage recruitment on your behalf. Recruitment companies offer customizable hiring solutions depending on your organizational setup and needs. They define processes and offer unrivaled industry insights to ensure access to high-quality talent. RPO staffing companies reduce cost-per-hire and time-to-hire, therefore improving your return on investment. 

How does RPO work?

Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) companies have access to vast candidate databases that they have accumulated over time. RPO companies carefully screen each applicant, covering industry-specific specifications. RPO companies determine all the parameters related to hiring and then evaluate the applicant if he/she is a good match for the company’s culture and requirements.

Following that, RPO will start with scheduling and facilitating interviews. Besides, as a long-term partner, an RPO provider can provide continuous evaluation of the hiring process. This is likely to include the duration to hire, cost to hire, and retention rates.

Recruiting Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a unique solution that involves transferring all or part of your recruitment needs. Acting as an extension of your organization, RPO providers either augment or take full ownership of all the design and execution of your recruitment process. Services can include:

• Workforce planning – Workforce planning is perfect for forecasting short-term and long-term hiring needs for the organization. 
• Hiring manager engagement – Improve communication channels between the hiring manager and the account teams. 
• Strategic sourcing – Help to identify platforms where high-performing candidates are available.
• Pre-employment screening – Conduct thorough background checks, employment history, and other records of the candidates
• Early careers or graduate recruitment – It can be used to develop outreach programs for graduates, internships, vacation schemes, apprenticeships, and more
• Talent engagement – Aid in positioning the company and its culture such that they can acquire the right talent
• Candidate management – Deliver an efficient end-to-end experience starting from targeting the candidate to their onboarding.
• Recruitment analytics support – Help to develop checklists and processes to measure and identify the metrics of the recruitment process.
• Compliance and risk management – needed to ensure that all processes and operations of recruitment are legal, ethical, and in line with regulations.

Stages of Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)

Hiring requirement assessment – Every employer has unique hiring requirements besides standard requirements. RPO  discovers what specifically to expect from the job requirement like knowledge, skills, experience, etc. Additionally, you may expect these things to be done expertly from them:

• Analyzing the client’s company size, salary structure, work culture, growth rate, and employee reviews to get an insight into the company. 

• Determining the gaps in your recruitment process & ways to address them. 
• Reducing team load by eliminating bottlenecks. Tracking & comparing inputs with output to determine the bottlenecks and hence, reducing the load on a specific team.
• Inculcating performance review checks to identify if there’s any gap in skills and proficiencies that can be added to the team.
• Engaging with existing employees to stay aware of who is going to leave, which can help you to find the replacement much in advance. 

Writing Job Description (JD)

Once the requirements are clear, preparing a comprehensive job description (JD) is the next step. This will help potential employees to learn more about the company’s requirements. The content of JDs comprises checklists of the duties & responsibilities he/she will be performing after getting the job.  

A clear job description should contain- 

• Job title/Designation
• Company’s name
• Duties and Responsibilities
• Qualification 
• Years of experience 
• Location  (nowadays companies mention – (Remote/On-site/ Hybrid) 
• Compensation, perks, and benefits

Talent Research

Outsourcing Companies then identify the right talent gathered from the pool of candidates from the job portals along with applied applications. 

• Creating a pool of talent. Also known as Talent Pool/community/Bank –
• Sourcing candidates.
• Following up on leads acquired from traditional career fairs or virtual career fairs.
• Searching passive candidates as well.
• Searching candidates’ profiles on job networking sites like LinkedIn. 
• Applicants who did not get selected for the position could be fitted to different job-roles that may be suited to them

Screening & Shortlisting

Resume screening and pooling of qualified candidates from the received applications. 

Screening – Once the applications start coming in, RPO moves to screening and shortlisting candidates.  It is done in four phases, which are as follows:

• Screening applications as per minimum qualification requirements.
• Sorting CVs with the credentials, experience, certification & skill sets that are preferred for the job role.
• Filtering applications that enclose both the preferred credentials and minimal qualifications.
• Filtering out any concerns mentioned in the CVs before interviewing

Interviewing

Interviewing is a one-on-one round that is being conducted with the shortlisted candidates. The size of the organization, the company’s hiring policy, and position urgency determine the interview rounds. Mostly it is done in the following steps- 

Wherein the shortlisted applicants receive an offer for interviews or rejection. The size of the hiring team and their requirements decide on the phases of interviews  as in how many rounds it should consist of. The most preferred rounds are:

• Telephonic screening or video interviewing
• Psychometric testing to assess the productivity of the candidate
• Face-to-face interviewing        

Measuring The Recruitment Process

Evaluation brings the recruitment process to closure. Evaluation is an important step in determining a candidate’s potential and capabilities for the job. So employers will identify and measure candidates’ eligibility, productivity, and competency for the role and then will make considerations if they are apt for the role or not. Candidates who have patiently completed the paperwork have less chance of making the ending odd, where the acceptance rate will be higher.

There are very few chances when there is zero opening in any company. Openings are constantly happening in any company. At the time of recruitment, follow the following steps- 

Do the reference check.

Giving an exceptional job offer while mentioning the joining date, work conditions, mentioning working hours, compensation, etc. 

Onboarding & Induction

Every company or the RPO service provider conducts training for the candidates to ensure the company’s success. The main agenda of training is to make everyone on the same page and understand the given responsibility. 

Benefits of RPO

With the shift towards new recruiting methods like Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), any business can benefit from a flexible to dedicated solution in recruitment. Unlike traditional recruiting methods, RPO isn’t only about filling positions but developing an overall hiring strategy for the employer’s long-term success.

• It improves scalability in recruitment
  Depending on set targets and goals, the hiring needs of most companies change throughout the year. The staff required for optimal workplace productivity can be determined as per the company’s requirements. A good RPO firm can anticipate and handle this situation with ease.
  By evaluating the unique requirements of different employers, recruitment will be done on a project or on-demand basis. This ensures that at every point in time, the correct number of skilled persons are hired to fill workforce positions.
  Makes hiring faster and cost-effective
  Outsourcing the recruitment process to an independent RPO provider can solve the problem by providing quality, job-specific hiring solutions within the shortest possible time. Organizations quickly adapt to the ever-changing business terrain to succeed in the long term in the market.
• RPO gives access to a quality pool of talent
  Finding a suitably qualified candidate for the position is a challenging task. Recruiting much-needed talent to fulfill organizational objectives can become difficult without the help of an RPO provider. Getting your way through the sea of recruitment companies that promise to provide candidates without failure is a little difficult. Implementing an RPO solution can help you to enable a controlled approach with a high-quality partnership service guaranteed. A well-established RPO service provider shares a detailed and extensive database of hard-to-find candidates required to fill job positions. When required, RPO can provide in-demand candidates to clients.
• RPO analysis helps strengthen business models
  As RPO providers have huge talent databases, they can predict future trends for the industry they are dealing in. RPO providers stimulate the progressive growth of organizations by utilizing AI and other dynamic recruitment assistance systems backed by technology which helps them to strengthen their business model.
• Boosts employer branding
  The importance of projecting any company’s image correctly is something that cannot be overly emphasized. But if candidates talk about the company on professional sites like LinkedIn, it becomes rewarding for the company. RPOs bring suitable candidates to the clients who talk well about the company and become its brand ambassadors. 
  A good RPO provider becomes a positive ambassador of your brand and communicates the right message to the market through different communication channels while hiring candidates.
• Lessens the burden of human resources
  Last but not least, it lessens the burden of an HR department. A professional recruitment service provider will ease your recruitment process with the help of technology and significantly lessens the burden on the HR department. When all the aspects of recruitment are channeled through an RPO firm, HR gets entirely free and focuses on other important internal matters of the company.  

RPO vs. Traditional Recruiting

• RPO differs from Traditional recruiting in that it focuses on improving an organization’s overall recruiting process, not just filling an open position. This includes analyzing factors such as turnover rates, technology, scalability, and time to fill positions.
• Traditional recruiters or placement firms get people in seats very quickly. While an RPO provider not only recruits candidates in less time but also sources out the best-fit candidates to fulfill the long-term needs of the client.
• Recruitment agencies can stop and start on a dime and don’t need a long lead time to do their job. RPO collaborations and partnerships need time to get to know your business requirements. Their approach to hiring can be more focused and specific to give a permanent or with a more proactive skill set and aim to be a permanent part of your internal talent acquisition teams.
• Through a traditional recruiter or a placement firm, as a company,  you need to bear some cost per hire. They are subject to get a commission basis per hire. 15% to 25% markup per hire can be incredibly cost-prohibitive for small businesses. Hiring for them becomes a business, as they get a commission basis per hire. Alternatively, an RPO service provider manages the entire HR function if you hire them for overall service. Also, an RPO provides a seamless transition to the company as they hire a new candidate who is thoroughly tested and trained for the business. 

Traditional RPO Models

Enterprise RPO 

An Enterprise RPO solution team puts clients’ needs at the forefront of the business. It helps to assess, analyze and implement changes that elevate the recruiter’s on-demand strategy. The RPO talent acquisition team manages the end-to-end recruitment life cycle through advanced marketing techniques, research-backed solutions, and employee retention strategies during sourcing, screening, scheduling, engaging, and onboarding for your organization.

Project RPO 

Through project RPO, your organization can enhance workforce planning and agility using market insights and talent analytics. It also helps find the right talent faster with innovative and AI-powered screening strategies. Project RPO helps minimize hiring costs by building a diverse workforce with an equitable hiring strategy and creating talent pools for niche and in-demand skills to source qualified talent faster. Hire effective talents through RPO. 

Recruiter on demand 

In On-demand RPO, hiring managers and internal recruitment teams get some benefits in recruitment. It is the process to be implemented when hiring needs to be done on a short-term basis. The recruitment is done by embedding some people into your existing team, to quickly scale up and support the changing needs of the business. While recruitment process outsourcing is considered a long-term investment for permanent recruiting solutions, Recruiter-on-demand is a viable method to fill an immediate need for support with the same level of commitment.

Keys to RPO Success

Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) can greatly benefit your company’s hiring function. Hiring an RPO eases the company’s recruitment process and rewards companies with an efficient pool of candidates who rightly fits into the position for the long term. 

1. Focus on hires
   The hires are the backbone of RPO engagement. Revenue increases, operational efficiency, and great culture are all traceable through the quality of new hires. Primarily, focusing on hires first results in all the mentioned benefits, and hence do not get distracted from your primary purpose, which is hiring. 
2. Get active executive support.
   You get active support through a successful RPO collaboration. Executive support and buy-in is essential to get the results you need and back your RPO relationship.
3. Conduct a survey as a baseline.
   When you start measuring your progress and success, you need a baseline to determine where you started. A pre-implementation hiring manager survey provides you with metrics to measure the performance or firm associated with the employee working on it.
   
4. Determine metrics and reporting upfront.
   When you begin to indulge in RPO solutions, you get to determine and measure the progress, make reports and make necessary edits to your next hiring plan.
5. Give quarterly results incentives.
   When you’ve established your goals, you give your people an incentive when it is achieved. Regardless of your RPO relationship, giving your RPO provider and internal resources a reason to work harder will take your company to heights. And as a company, you can reward the staff for their achievement.

From expertise to industry knowledge, a recruitment outsourcing company possesses skills and is equipped with recruitment tools that can improve your recruitment process. While an average RPO provider focuses on finding the best fit for your company’s employment opportunities, NLB Services hiring expertise and innovative candidate-marketing techniques, uses AI based Talent Sourcing tools which help in scrutinising a larger talent pool and get you better applications.

Our innovative strategy for sourcing and attracting high-quality individuals over the course of decades has been an astounding success.