You have the right business plan and model which means a strong foundation for delivering high-quality products or services, but have you considered how crucial it is to have the ideal team driving your business towards its objectives? With benefits such as a thriving organisational culture, increased productivity, guaranteed customer satisfaction, and many more, there are endless reasons why you should invest heavily in acquiring the right talent for your business.
Often, business owners wrongly prefer in-house recruiting or may resort to working with a staffing agency, even when these two methods have clear shortcomings. So, what’s the right way to do it? Simple: RPO.
What’s RPO in Talent Acquisition?
RPO is an acronym for recruitment process outsourcing which is a strategic hiring method that involves outsourcing all or part of your recruitment activities to an external provider. An RPO provider doesn’t replace your HR team but extends it, taking over specific tasks like sourcing, screening, and onboarding.
When you hire a reputable recruitment RPO provider like Kinetix, you enjoy a range of benefits from a streamlined talent acquisition process to improved employer branding. What’s more, with the burden of acquiring the right candidates taken off your shoulders, you can focus on the core activities of your business and probably even identify areas of improvement that you’d have missed from concentrating too much on the hiring process.
Types of RPO
There are three common types of RPO you can choose from if you’re looking to hire the right candidates for your business and these are:
- On-Demand RPO – This comes in handy if you have short-term hiring needs, that may not necessarily require an extensive commitment from the RPO provider. You can use it if you’re having unexpected upsurges in hiring volumes or want to fill specialised roles that don’t call for a full-time hiring service.
- Function-based RPO – Function-based RPO is designed to take care of a specific segment of your recruitment process such as candidate sourcing or screening. That way, you can still enrich your recruitment process even if you don’t outsource it entirely.
- End-to-end RPO – This type is the most comprehensive form of RPO that allows you to outsource your entire recruitment process to an external provider. End-to-end RPO is perfect if you need a recruitment solution that covers everything from job requisition to onboarding.
One thing that is clear here is that RPO is indeed flexible. Other than coming in different forms, you can customise the individual services further to meet your specific needs. So, whether you want to implement RPO to solve persistent recruitment challenges or you just want to use it to reach your strategic goals, there will always be an ideal solution.
Best Practices for RPO
The one thing to love about RPO is that it doesn’t require a lot of input from your end, especially if you’re working with an outstanding provider who’s taken the time to understand your business and formulate the most ideal solutions. Still, you will have a part to play to maximise your benefits, so here are some best practices to help with that:
1. Outline Your Objectives Clearly
You never want to outsource your recruitment processes without having a clear set of goals in mind. So, start by asking yourself what challenges you are facing that make it necessary to get the support you are seeking from an RPO provider. This can be anything from enhancing your quality of hires, reducing the time to fill, optimising the hiring costs, or all of the above.
Understanding your objectives is the only way to know what you should expect from the provider during and after the hiring process. It also makes it easier to evaluate the success of the project and its ROI.
2. Choose a Provider You Can Rely On
Almost every provider who understands RPO to the core will be a great boost to your hiring efforts, but what you are interested in here isn’t a slight improvement. Since your main goal is to get your hiring process right and get the best quality of hires possible, it’s paramount to go with a successful provider.
This should be a company with a proven track record, remarkable experience in the relevant industry or niche, and an in-depth understanding of your unique business needs. Some of the key aspects to pay close attention to include, but aren’t limited to, candidate sourcing, screening, technology adoption, and employer branding. It’s also good practice to consider additional factors such as cultural fit and communication efficacy.
3. Encourage Collaboration
An RPO provider is ideally supposed to work as part of your organisation, which makes it necessary to encourage collaboration between your internal HR team and the RPO provider. Elements like regular communication, shared goals, and clear expectations are essential to this goal. A collaborative approach also makes it possible to finetune the recruitment process over time, so you end up with a flawless model.
4. Streamline Processes and Workflows
The main goal of RPO is to streamline and optimise your entire recruitment process, which means identifying bottlenecks, eliminating inefficiencies, and re-designing the existing workflows. Make sure to work closely with your provider to meet these goals and utilise their expertise maximally to implement best practices and processes that align with your unique requirements.
Some of the tips that will come in handy here include automating tasks where feasible, leveraging data analytics, and implementing tools like applicant tracking systems (ATS). It’s especially crucial to leverage data and analytics to power your recruitment decisions. You should even consider creating key performance indicators (KPIs) alongside your service provider to make it easier to track the effectiveness of the RPO partnership.
5. Focus on Candidate Experience
Your decision to use RPO to acquire the right talent for your company will only bear great results if it delivers a positive candidate experience. And this isn’t only beneficial in attracting the right candidates, but also makes it possible to retain them.
Make sure your RPO provider prioritises candidate experience by implementing solutions that enhance clear communication, providing timely feedback, and embracing technology to create a seamless recruitment process. In addition to empowering you to attract the right candidates and retain them, a good candidate experience will also play a key role in enhancing your employer brand.
Reclaim Your Hiring Prowess With RPO
The talent market can be quite dynamic, especially now that it’s been evolving at a rapid rate. So if you feel like it’s become increasingly difficult to compete for the right candidates, you’re not at all wrong. This can only mean one thing: you have to adopt innovative strategies to boost your hiring efficacy.
Teaming up with a reliable RPO provider like Kinetix, therefore, should be a great way to reclaim your hiring prowess and take on your competitors knowing you have the right team at your disposal.
