If you’re a growing company, it may be tempting to think that Recruitment Process Outsourcing (or RPO) is not for you. Success stories tend to focus on large corporates or long established household names that have saved millions of pounds recruiting thousands of staff – their HR (or more often, procurement) departments basking in the commercial glory.
Likewise, many RPO suppliers hail from larger, well-known consultancies that offer many different flavours of business process outsourcing. Granted – they can offer an end-to-end service to those that want it, but because of their heritage, the focus tends to be on hard metrics such as cost-per-hire and time-to-hire. Some also manage all of your recruitment supplier relationships, even down to paying agencies once the work is done.
If RPO is something you’ve been considering, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this ‘single throat choke’ (as it’s inelegantly known in the market) is the only choice available. But while full-service RPO does have its advantages in consistency and driving cost-efficiencies, it can mean the customer relinquishes control over their employer brand and how they shape the candidate’s experience of their company.
The good news is that a number of RPO companies are responding to growing demand to outsource hiring services from smaller and medium-sized companies. In growing industries such as app and web development, for example, relative start-ups are turning to RPO as they struggle to cope with recruitment demands in-house and want to draw on recruiters’ expertise for specialist recruitment projects.
This need will only increase, too. According to the latest figures on job vacancies from the Office for National Statistics, the number of vacancies in companies employing fewer than 250 staff went up by around 6% in the period between October and December 2013 – while the rise was almost half that in larger companies. Clearly, recruitment requirements in smaller companies are growing in volume and complexity.
So why might opting for a ‘pick n mix’ approach to recruitment outsourcing work in this environment? Here are a few reasons:
With these issues in mind, consider what your short, medium and long-term goals are, and where an outsourced approach would work well, or where you’d rather keep it in house. After all, it’s becoming more and more possible to have the best of both worlds.
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