As the name implies, Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) basically involves using a third party service to handle your recruitment activities instead of having your human resources department or some other in-house department handle them.
In other words, the external service that you are using will take on the responsibility of recruiting staff for your business based on the needs of the job. They will profile candidates, interview them, shortlist suitable candidates and negotiate starting salary as well. Long story short, these recruiters will act on the behalf of your business throughout the entire process.
But what are the benefits of that?
Specialized Recruitment Services
All in all, the main benefits of using RPO involve the fact that the third party service that will be handling your recruitment will be more specialized and will be able to perform the same sort of recruitment processes as your business would at a lower cost.
Because these services will have a larger staff of specialized recruiters, a bigger database of resumes to search through, and so on they are better prepared to carry out recruitment and will end up spending less money doing so.
For example, in order to fill an open position in your business you may have to advertise in order to get candidates to send you their resumes, but a specialized recruitment service may not need to do so because they have a large number of resumes on hand that they can use to find a match initially.
Another benefit of using RPO is it allows you to set clear performance targets that the recruitment service must strive to meet. With the commercial relationship between your business and the recruitment service, the onus is on them to focus their recruitment strategy according to the needs of your business.
All in all, this amounts to faster, cheaper and more effective recruitment on the whole – but that is only assuming that RPO is implemented in an ideal situation and continues to be managed efficiently.
In a nutshell, it is up to the business to ensure that they truly are gaining the potential benefits of using a specialized recruitment service. That involves not only choosing the right recruitment service to help with your RPO but also making certain that it continues to be cost effective as time goes by.
Understanding the benefits that could potentially be up to offer should allow you to have a better handle on what you should be looking for when approaching a recruitment service or agency.
