COVID-19 has had an enormous overall impact on the global job market, but different organisations have had markedly different hiring experiences in the past year.

The airline industry has almost come to a standstill. Many organisations in the healthcare sector, meanwhile, have had to ramp up their hiring volumes. Others have substantially increased and decreased their hiring volumes at different stages.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing, a model of business that involves organisations outsourcing all or part of their recruitment process to external service providers, has been a blessing for scores of organisations who have had to pivot between wildly-fluctuating hiring volumes during COVID-19.

But how does Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) work? And how can it benefit your organisation?

Here, we break down the major benefits of RPO for organisations faced with tricky hiring decisions in uncertain times.

1. Scalability and agility

One of the major strengths of an RPO solution is the scalability it provides. It means you can increase or decrease your hiring activity based on short and long-term workforce plans that help you achieve your business objectives.

Our workforce solutions specialism, Hays Talent Solutions, creates bespoke workforce solutions tailored to your specific business circumstances that can support your business at any or all stages in the recruitment journey.

Whether you need to outsource research and planning, talent attraction, recruitment and selection, onboarding, engagement and exit, or any combination of the above, RPO providers have the resources, recruitment process expertise and technology to quickly deliver solutions tailored to your needs.

You can save on fixed costs and you avoid over-commitment to a fixed number of hires when you work with an RPO provider. Hays Talent Solutions’ RPO aligns with your budget and its needs.

We also provide advanced services such as workforce planning, which supports you in identifying the skills you need to meet your business goals and return to growth.

2. Fixed costs become variable costs

2019 research by Deloitte found that organisations consider the task of finding qualified experienced hires to be the biggest challenge for their recruiters. Organisations with an internal talent acquisition model incur a variety of fixed costs including internal recruiter salaries, professional development and training for staff, recruitment technology costs and office rental space rates.

When your organisation’s hiring volumes recede, many of your fixed costs remain. This isn’t ideal for organisations who are experiencing sporadic fluctuations in hiring volumes.

Outsourcing to an RPO, however, enables you to transfer your fixed costs to variable costs.

In other words, you pay for the services you need. With an RPO, when your hiring volumes decline, so do your recruitment costs.

3. Cost reduction

There are various ways an RPO can reduce recruitment costs. Some of the main cost savings to be aware of include:

Advertising costs: Organisations looking for new talent incur significant costs advertising their new job on job boards. These costs increase vastly according to the price tier of the ad type, the number of boards an organisation advertises on and the number of roles an organisation needs to fill. Organisations also need resources to draft job offers that attract the talent they are seeking.

An RPO provider helps you reduce these costs through consolidated procurement, access to bulk purchasing agreements and high-quality proactive talent pools.

Scalability: In unpredictable markets, the flexibility of an RPO solution allows you to quickly scale recruitment activity up or down.

If you need to reduce your hiring activity or freeze it altogether, your provider can redeploy its recruiters elsewhere until your organisation needs them again.

Having the flexibility to size your recruitment team by hiring demand is great for both your organisation’s culture and your bottom line.

Reduced third party agency spend through higher levels of direct sourcing: One of the ways to measure the success of your investment in an RPO program is to calculate the costs you save on third party recruitment agencies. When you engage our services, you can recover substantial spend you would have otherwise allocated to external recruitment agencies.

With an RPO provider in your corner, you increase the volume of employees you source directly. Your RPO is networked with its own pool of quality talent. Not only do you attract the right candidates – you save time and costs doing so.

4. Access to expertise

The global RPO market is anticipated to grow considerably in the next five years. And it’s easy to understand why.

As we know, talent acquisition is becoming an increasingly complex process. Many organisations are seeking external support to stay on track of this rapidly evolving space.

Our RPO solutions are based on our specialised recruitment expertise. We parlay our knowledge and technology to build attraction strategies that ensure your brand is on the radars of the right candidates. Our best-practice talent solutions focus on improving the candidate and hiring manager experience, while matching your organisation with the talent you need to fulfil your business objective.

5. Transfer of risk

Organisations who use internal recruitment to meet high volume staffing needs shoulder financial risks. As we saw at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many organisations needed to significantly downsize fast.

Consequently, they had to reduce internal recruitment numbers, and at substantial cost.

This meant that significant numbers of their talent acquisition resources were redundant or redeployed into other areas of the business.

With an RPO solution, your provider shoulders much of this risk. In scenarios where your organisation needs to downsize significantly and quickly, your RPO provider can redeploy its human resources to provide support to other clients.

As organisations start to rebuild themselves after the impact of COVID-19, we are seeing increased interest in our RPO offering and the benefits it creates during uncertain times.

To learn more, visit our global website and discover what Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is.

AUTHOR

Shane Little
Managing Director APAC, Hays Talent Solutions
As Managing Director for APAC at Hays Talent Solutions, Shane is responsible for the delivery of market leading Talent Solutions to a range of clients across Australia, New Zealand and Asia. He has a unique insight into total talent management, talent acquisition and contingent workforce programs having been involved in early stage PSL arrangements, first generation programmes and mature workforce solutions.