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What is Recruitment Process Outsourcing?
The process of recruitment outsourcing involves delegation of an organization’s recruiting functions to a service provider for scaling its outreach and to enhance operational efficiency. Vendors that provide such services offer the required contract IT staffing, process outline and technology to assist companies in streamlining hiring engagements in an effective manner. They can equip client organizations with a recruiting team or handle the process with the help of an off-site team of experts. In certain cases, they may provide a combination of both depending upon the availability of talent. Right from sourcing to selection of the right candidate, RPO service providers ensure that the quality of records is maintained and all hiring processes are conducted fairly in due time.
Given the rising importance and demand of RPO, providers are integrating advanced technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and artificial intelligence during implementation of a part or the entire hiring process. This may include automated screening of curriculum vitae, portfolio or resume, self-scheduling of interviews, and more. RPO recruitment process outsourcing can overcome challenges presented by traditional in-house hiring processes such as high operational expenses, complex workflow, time-taking procedures, and more. Let us go through the working of RPO, its process, benefits, and reasons why companies are switching to the same in this blog.
Why Choose RPO Recruitment Companies?
As of 2022, the global market for RPO was valued at approximately US $7.33 billion and is expected to reach around US $24.32 by 2030, increasing at a CAGR of 16.1% during the forecast period between 2023 and 2030. Considering the Indian recruitment market, it is poised to be a considerable catalyst in the growth of this industry, given its vast pool of talents, skill base, candidates, and information technology experts. The Indian RPO market is anticipated to reach an approximate value of US $420 million by 2027, growing at a CAGR of about 15.5%, thus significantly contributing to the global hiring industry. Given below are some pointers as to why RPO companies are considered a suitable choice for conducting effective hiring processes.
1. Market Trends: The major factors contributing to this surge include a growing attrition rate, modernized education systems, and increased demand for skilled workers.
2. Labor Shortage: Moreover, labor shortages in the market, detailed focus on core operational and technological processes, and cost cuts are also contributing to the same.
3. Flexible Models: Rise in adoption of flexible models including end-to-end RPO processes and on-demand candidate recruitment has become a common trend in small and medium enterprises as well as large organizations globally.
4. Higher Adoption: Many companies are leveraging or exploring RPO services that offer enhanced value proposition including technological expertise, global talent pool, and other benefits.
5. Industrial Expansion: As industries such as banking, financial services, and insurance, healthcare, telecommunications and others are growing and gaining momentum day-by-day, RPO recruitment companies serve as a one stop solution for all market expansion and hiring-related needs.
Source: Grand View Research
Growing global market size of recruitment process outsourcing during 2020 to 2030
6. Competitive Edge: When given access to top-tier talent, tech-based companies can gain a sharpened competitive edge in the market through optimized recruitment processes.
7. Core Focus: Companies can indulge their internal resources in more productive activities and core business workflows. This helps in driving operational efficiency and productivity.
8. Brand Recognition: These companies also assist in building a distinguished employer identity and brand by highlighting the organization’s work culture, values, positive candidature and experience.
9. Innovative Growth: Recruitment process outsourcing accelerates growth trajectory for meeting demands related to rapid growth and for establishing a scalable workforce. This facilitates innovation and quicker market expansion.
10. Optimized Costs: Various market studies suggest that by leveraging RPO services to streamline recruitment processes, organizations can save operational or hiring-related expenses with respect to economies of scale.
11. Scalable Execution: The recruitment process conducted by these companies is flexible and can be scaled as per market or business demands. They offer adaptable and agile hiring efforts that can be amplified or scaled down whenever required.
12. Hiring Quality: With a wider talent pool and expertise in hiring-related decision-making, RPOs can manage enhanced and high-quality hires as compared to traditional methods.
13. Distributed Effort: At times during the introduction of mergers, acquisitions, projects, specific demand, geographies, and other instances, expected outcomes from the internal recruitment teams increase exponentially, which can be eased using RPO services.
How do RPO Recruitment Companies Function?
As we discussed above, RPO is basically a strategic partnership rather than resume gathering cum shortlisting vendor or temporary staffing services. The external provider in this case manages the hiring process partially or on an end-to-end basis as per the client’s requirement and dynamic demand volume periods. Hybrid model is also an option where the organization’s internal recruitment team functions with RPO specialists.
Tackling Pain Points
In case of no added system support, technological assistance, standardized metrics or ample hands-on deck, human resource teams may get overwhelmed rendering poorly planned decisions, delayed interviews and resume shortlisting. Also, decisions taken hastily through outdated traditional sourcing methods may result in more voluntary resignations and lower cost efficiency especially in cases of specialized roles.
One must understand recruitment process outsourcing companies set up requirements for establishing a roadmap towards effective recruitment engine for smooth and scalable progress. It is also of considerable importance to know possible red flags and correct timing while using external recruitment services. For example, due to the organization’s extensive growth journey and hiring pressure, the internal team may be fatigued. This may result in job roles and position status staying open for longer durations, consistent candidature dropouts, and lowering offer-to-accept rates over a particular timeframe.
Moreover, a mismatch with respect to job roles or candidate aptitude leads to increased employee turnover, constant complaints related to candidate quality from the management, and poor onboarding experience. It is usually the case when companies secure funding, are set to launch a new product or solution in the market, are expanding in newer regions, require quick scale up or operational transformation, and are lacking local recruitment support for international hiring processes. RPO services can assist in tackling all these pain points apart from the various advantages offered as mentioned in the previous section. They provide speed, complete process control, and outreach assistance as and when organizations engage with such companies at the right time, moment, and with the right implementation process.
Steps of Recruitment Process Outsourcing Implementation
The following is the step-by-step guide of how these companies render recruitment outsourcing and implement it by collaborating with client organizations.
Defining Recruitment Goals
The client organization must undergo a thorough evaluation of its current hiring processes before taking assistance from RPO providers. It must pinpoint all bottlenecks, reasons for losing candidates at the initial stages of the sales funnel, pain points, and delays during negotiations in offers. Also, the list of metrics being tracked and their importance must be noted, such as retention rates, cost-per-hire, time-to-fill, and more. Established broader business objectives must be aligned with the current recruitment goals. For example, if the organization is looking to expand its services in newer geographies, it is necessary to get associated with recruiters who understand the local market and candidate behavior. As all goals to organizational success get clearly defined and shared with external recruiters, effective RPO partner engagement can take place.
Selecting RPO Partner
As and when all pain points or challenges get mapped and objectives or priorities get defined, a suitable RPO recruitment process service provider can be chosen. Clients must go beyond initial selection criteria such as pricing, value propositions, pros and cons. They must consider the provider’s industry-specific experience, portfolio, resume volume, sourcing capabilities, and cultural understanding of the client. They must ensure possibilities of scale up as per requirement and dynamic market changes such as higher demand volume and specialized niche roles.
It is also important for the service provider to have considerable recruiting experience as per the client’s industrial sweet spots which can be healthcare, customer services, logistics, fintech, information technology or others. Maintaining transparency is another major selection criteria and the client must ask for reporting cadence, service level agreements, and communication models prior to official engagement. Considering these factors results in potential growth and efficient talent strategy through RPO service providers who act as an extended arm for the internal recruitment team.
Building Recruitment Plan
Furthermore, the process moves towards collaborating with the chosen service provider for building a customized recruitment plan. Traditional standardized cookie-cutter approaches that apply uniform set of methodologies based on one-size fits all in case of implementing multiple projects, tasks, and operations often lack significant customization options, and are not suitable for recruitment processes. The hiring plan must be designed as uniquely as the business and its objectives.
The client and the RPO teams work hand in hand to define workflows, establish effective handoff between firms, brainstorm job descriptions, outline ownership of approval process and hiring decisions, and finalize tools, software, and platforms to be utilized in the process. The RPO recruitment process service provider also sets up performance dashboards, tracking systems, feedback loop system, detailed functional blueprint for smooth operational partnership with the client.
Implementing Recruitment Plan
Once the business goals are defined, the right recruitment partner is chosen, and a constructive recruitment plan is built, launching the plan comes as the next step. Points to consider in this section include data-driven visibility and result-oriented alignment of the plan during launch. The steps involved are technical integration, training, and establishment of communication channels to assist the RPO recruitment process outsourcing partner in learning the client’s products, values, solutions, services, ideal candidate profiles befitting the organizational culture and technical prowess, and more.
It also involves syncing applications tracking systems, providing access to job boards, folders, and files for high-performing visibility. Both the internal and external recruitment team must have a concise and clear understanding of their job roles, objectives, performance metrics, and methods of functioning amongst themselves. This is where change management and partnership onboarding plan comes into play for strategic internal buy-in and successful launch that sets the tone for a potentially productive long-term collaboration.
Process Evaluation
As the goal is to establish a well-defined recruitment process and functional teams that are set to accomplish business objectives, the entire workflow cannot be deemed as static. With rising demand volumes, new product launches, requirement of dynamic technical specializations, market changes, and growth milestones, hiring needs to evolve. Continuous optimization of processes, thorough measurement, process refinement, and scale-up form critical parts of the pipeline. The funnel metrics, candidate feedback, and conversion rates must be constantly reviewed within a specific timeframe such as on a quarterly or monthly basis.
Advanced data analytics can be used for RPO recruitment services to adapt strategies, spot bottlenecks, and track performance accurately. Consistent and timely recalibration of the outsourcing model is also required which may include updating recruitment ads, adjustment of brand recognition, and source channel expansion. At times, the tools, platforms, or processes need to be changed in case the results delivered are not satisfactory. RPO services showcase agile operations and strategies to conduct this change and streamline the hiring process that can improve with every hiring round.
Sample workflow, pricing and engagement models of recruitment process outsourcing companies
Future of Recruitment Process Outsourcing
Given below are some of the emerging trends in the recruitment outsourcing landscape
1. Specialization: Specialized skill set including areas such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, cybersecurity and more is the need of the hour. To keep up with the surging demand, niche knowledge and domain recruitment service providers can effectively source such talent.
2. Technology: Recruiters tend to focus more on creative and strategic initiatives in lieu of mundane and repetitive tasks. Automation tools and AI are efficiently revolutionizing such processes through automated screening of resumes and initial assessments of candidates.
3. Journey: Another important area that is gaining importance in the talent market is prioritizing candidate experience. RPO recruitment companies play a paramount role delivering personalized and positive candidature journeys through effective communication, seamless onboarding, and in-time feedback processes.
4. Remote Work: The necessity of remote work, especially in the post-pandemic era, has led to emerging virtual recruitment frameworks. RPOs across the globe are starting to adapt to these changes through virtual onboarding software, video conferencing, online assessment of remote candidate, and more.
5. Predictive Analytics: Use of sophisticated tools for data analytics is a trending RPO practice as it assists in extracting valuable insights. The same can be used in recruitment metrics for making informed data-driven decisions. These insights are also useful for anticipating hiring requirements, identifying potential talent pools, and areas of improvement.
Navigate Evolving RPO Landscape with KritiKal
We discussed in this blog how India’s technical recruitment sector is constantly shifting approaches for talent acquisition. RPO recruitment companies are emerging as cost-saving strategic solutions for the rising demand in niche skills, highlighting employer reputation, and data-driven hiring. KritiKal Solutions offers flexible RPO models for supporting mid-sized, large, and startup companies as per a result-driven acumen. We showcase advanced sourcing expertise, real-time insights into interviews and candidature, and recruitment technology for streamlined hiring. We build efficient hiring systems for the clients as we understand that recruitment processes may turn complex and dynamic with growing demands, and thus we present a scalable path forward for the same.
We can provide you with a competitive edge in the market as compared to traditional hiring methods and other RPO providers as we effectively tackle commonly known issues in this field such as knowledge gaps related to organizational culture, loss of direct control in the recruitment process, dependency concerns and delays in offer-to-join acceptance, and technology integration issues. Please get in touch with us at sales@kritikalsolutions.com to know more about our recruitment processes and to realize your hiring requirements in a smart, strategic, and swift manner.
Upinder Singh Marwah currently works as the Assistant Vice President – IT Sales and India Go-to-Market at KritiKal Solutions. He has over 26 years of diverse experience in handling talent and team building functions, crafting and executing go-to-market strategies for driving sales and distribution of innovative products and optimizing business outcomes. With expertise in sales management, Six Sigma, strategic leadership, risk mitigation, capacity building, project execution, and process re-engineering, he has delivered impactful results.