Advantages Businesses Gain with RPO for High-Volume Recruitment

During busy seasons, organizations often are flooded with job openings and must hire quickly. Unfortunately, their internal hiring process can collapse under the pressure of meeting these hiring goals and create a poor experience for candidates.

This is where Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) can help. RPO is where an organization uses an outside company to provide all aspects of candidate sourcing, screening, and interviewing on behalf of the employer. By partnering with an RPO agency, hiring organizations benefit from a partner that has been successfully recruiting candidates for decades and as such can be a very practical and efficient method for improving their hiring results.

The Problems with High Volume Recruiting 

The pressure to fill multiple positions in a certain time frame while keeping the quality is overwhelming. Here are some high-volume recruiting challenges you can avoid with RPO.

Reading hundreds of applications

Let’s be honest, your talent acquisition team isn’t perfect, no matter how good they are. The sheer number of applicants makes it difficult to find the right candidates and this often leads to missed opportunities and delays.

Tight hiring timelines

The pressure and urgency to fill these roles quickly often result in rushed decisions that can affect the quality of candidates you vet – this leads to back and forth and wasted time during interviews. It’s like going back to square one.

Forcing your team beyond their limits. 

Your team isn’t made up of machines; they are all people, and as people, they can be drained from doing too many interviews, negotiating terms, and attending meetings with potential new hires. Wearing down your team like this may cause them to become less productive, as well as suffer from burnout.

The Answer: Recruitment Process Outsourcing 

With RPO, you…

Deliver on time. 

RPO enables your team to meet the hiring needs of the season without sacrificing quality. Backed by specialists, you can fulfill your large-scale recruitment needs and concentrate on your core business.

Hit (or even beat) hiring deadlines. 

Your agency’s expert sourcing strategies, combined with technology and streamlined processes, can help reduce time-to-hire by up to 55%. That’s like a goal!

Monitor your spending.

RPO allows you to retain greater amounts of cash within the organization due to the efficiencies associated with RPO’s modern forms of business tools and technology. With a variety of cost-effective sourcing methods for bulk hiring and for long-term effects, RPO will decrease the turnover of employees as it will allow for employers to hire the right person.

Develop quality talent. 

There’s an unwritten rule in talent acquisition – quality over quantity. But I get it, it’s a little hard to keep up with the sudden demand. With advanced systems, you can always find hard-to-find quality talent. The right person does more than fill a role, they can actually make your company look good.

Work smarter, with technology.

RPO leverages modern technology to improve the efficiency of your systems and processes. Examples include AI screening, automated scheduling, and gamified assessments.

Partnering with an RPO Provider (Tips) 

Working with your external staffing agency is critical to a successful hiring process. Here are things to do and things to remember.

Identify the problems with your current hiring process. 

Before you start looking at vendors, figure out what parts of your current hiring process are failing.

• Are you struggling to find qualified talent?
• Is your time to hire costing your business?
• Are you stuck on a particular step of the process?

Create a list of the things you are looking for. 

Once you understand what needs to be fixed, develop a detailed request for proposal. Look at your potential agency’s:

• Track record
• Software/tools they will be using in the evaluation of the candidates
• What to do when your hiring needs change suddenly
• Price/charge
• End-to-end process

Check if they fit your culture. 

You don’t just need to check candidates for cultural fit, you need to see if your partner agency fits with how you work. Once the hiring process begins, it’s they who will be talking to your future employees. They will be representing your company so it is important to find a partner that lives your culture.

Work together to build your hiring process. 

Establish your definition of success at the outset of the hiring process. Work with your partner to determine the next appropriate action within your organization’s hiring process, and identify potential gray areas as soon as possible.

When you need to hire quickly (and at a high volume), having RPO’s structured approach can be advantageous. RPO is a game changer in talent acquisition – it takes the chaos out of mass hiring.

Before you make your next hiring or partner staffing agency decision, check out our complete guide to the different types of RPOs and how they can fit your hiring needs.