5 Signs Your Company Needs to Consider RPO
Struggling with talent shortages? How about high recruitment costs? Or maybe you're facing challenges scaling your internal teams to meet demand?
Modern enterprises face these challenges in a competitive talent marketplace, where the pressure is to do more with less, lowering recruitment costs while attracting high-quality talent. It's a significant challenge and one that may seem insurmountable if you don't have the right solution in place.
This is where Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) can play a strategic role. It’s not just outsourcing talent acquisition functions to a third party; it’s a strategic partnership designed to enhance hiring capabilities, reduce costs, and improve efficiency.
What are the warning signs that your company needs to consider RPO? And how can partnering with RPO benefit your company? Here are 5 warning signs we'll look at in this article:
- High Hiring Costs
- Fluctuating Hiring Needs
- Long Time-to-Hire
- Difficulty Sourcing Specialized or In-Demand Talent
- Lack of Reliable Recruitment Analytics and Insights
High Hiring Costs
Recruitment costs are increasing and your efforts are coming under the scrutiny of the finance team. You are investing in advertising, agency fees, and internal HR support, but the efficiency isn’t there. The return on investment of your budget is lopsided, and the results leave you scratching your head. It's a common misconception to think that more money can increase results.
High hiring costs are often a symptom, not the actual problem. These escalating expenses typically stem from challenges in accessing suitable candidate pools, utilizing appropriate tools, or streamlining your hiring process. An RPO provider excels at identifying and addressing these root causes, ultimately helping to reduce costs and improve hiring efficiency.
It may be counterintuitive, especially if you've had a bad experience with a hiring agency before, but working with an RPO partner is often the right move. Unlike traditional agencies, RPO providers like AMS aim to create long-term partnerships with their clients. This ensures that not only do you get process improvements upfront that reduce costs, but you also benefit from value creation over the long term. This is exactly what Equinor experienced when working with AMS – a dramatic, 40% reduction in hiring costs compared to the previous approach.
Fluctuating Hiring Needs
Scaling your internal team to meet a surge in hiring needs is a bit of an oxymoron. You not only need to address large-scale requirements but also attract, hire, and onboard new staff to your internal teams. The challenge of meeting seasonal or project-based hiring needs is a key sign that you need to consider an RPO partner.
Project-based RPO is a core competency of RPO providers like AMS. As long term partners, they are able to scale effectively to meet your hiring requirements by ramping up resources and efforts. RPO partners have a fully stacked bench of talent acquisition experts ready to jump in and help your team. This model has the benefit of allowing you to scale efforts up and down with our business needs, while avoiding the need for overstaffed internal teams.
The fact that RPO providers are long-term, strategic partners means that they are able to provide on-demand services and prepare your team for surges in hiring demand. Whether you need to staff a new project or respond to evolving market and industry conditions, an RPO provider is an ideal solution to this challenge. As an example of this in the real-world, AMS helped Burger King meet high volume hiring needs filling more than 800 roles in an 8 week period to hire for 43 locations.
Long Time-to-Hire
Vacancies are a liability in a competitive market where speed is an advantage. Waiting for a role to be filled while your internal team is overwhelmed with screening and job interviews is a common challenge. This challenge can be measured by the time-to-hire metric, where the goal is to reduce this time to ensure productivity and competitiveness.
RPO partners can meet this challenge in a few ways:
- RPO providers have access to a broad talent pools offering access to a global network of talent
- Field-tested and optimized recruitment processes, from attracting talent to onboarding new hires
- Usage of advanced analytics and modern recruitment tools like automation and AI
By meeting this challenge, not only can you improve a key metric in your recruitment process, but you can vastly improve candidate experience. A streamlined, efficient hiring process leads to better outcomes for both the employer and the candidate. When AMS partnered with Rolls Royce to help with its early careers and campus recruitment strategy, we were able to reduce screening time from 23 days to 2 days while improving hiring manager and candidate satisfaction.
Difficulty Sourcing Specialized or Hard-to-Find Talent
In competitive industries like life sciences and tech, it can be challenging to find specialized talent. These skills are highly sought after with many companies vying for the attention of qualified candidates. Filling these niche roles is critical for your long-term success, but too many organizations often have difficulty filling these vacant positions.
With an RPO provider, you gain access to a broader talent pool; you also gain access to expertise on how to fill niche roles by sourcing qualified candidates working in other adjacent industries. RPO providers are able to source and screen candidates using tailored recruiting strategies and techniques to fill specialized roles quickly. Broad experience across multiple industries means RPO providers can speak the candidate's language and source scarce talent that other organizations may pass over.
Creating a proactive talent pipeline allows you to be strategic with your approach to filling specialized positions. This challenge can be particularly difficult when trying to fill executive roles. AMS worked with Dow Shofield Watts to bring on new partners in executive roles, drawing on a vast talent map of 7,138 individuals across 7 different service lines. The success of this executive search program helped meet DSW’s immediate needs and provided long-term strategic benefits.
Lack of Reliable Recruitment Analytics and Insights
Modern recruitment utilizes analytics and data insights to improve candidate selection, candidate experience, and track key recruiting metrics. Advanced tools and automation can significantly augment and enhance the entire recruiting lifecycle. Cutting edge technology like AI can introduce dramatic cost savings and process improvements. However, all this new technology and data can be overwhelming to in-house teams who are often strapped for time and struggle to prioritize training.
RPO providers base their services on providing a competitive advantage to clients. As mentioned earlier, RPO partners have a fully stacked bench of experts whose job it is to develop techniques and leverage modern tools to provide the best outcome for clients. Providers like AMS are leaders in using recruiting technology to improve process efficiency, track data, and optimize hiring strategies with a data-driven approach.
The benefit of working with an RPO provider is that you gain access to these tools and the expertise that makes them so effective in modern recruitment. This gives you the ability to directly benefit with improvements to metrics like time-to-hire and cost-of-hire, as well as to facilitate knowledge transfer and training to your internal teams. Domino's Pizza partnered with AMS to implement a modern, high tech recruitment process that reduced application time to less than 5 minutes, increased applicant flow by 40%, and launched across 60+ franchise groups.
Is Your Company Ready for RPO?
Do you recognize any of the signs that you may need help from a RPO partner? From high hiring costs and unreliable recruitment metrics to challenges finding the right candidates or utilizing modern technology, an RPO partner can help overcome these challenges.
RPO does more than just help you face these challenges head-on; a true RPO partner like AMS will help you create a strategic advantage in your recruitment function. Benefit from global expertise, digital innovation, and proven results to transform how you recruit. Ready to take the next step? Contact us today and get a customized RPO consultation.
