Article

5 Ways Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) Helps Your Business Grow

by Patrick Glynn

The job market remained hot in 2023 as the U.S. economy added over three million jobs, and as of January 2024, there are an estimated 1.4 job openings for every one person looking for a job. Companies are still competing with each other for top talent—an added pressure for anyone looking to fill a role at their company. Here is where outsourcing your recruitment process comes in handy.

As you look to grow your business, recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) can help with a couple of things:

It can build your infrastructure to ensure scalability
You get better candidate quality for your needs
General recruiting and HR processes improve
It cuts down the amount of time it takes to fill roles at your business
You provide a better candidate experience

RPO also helps retain your employees, too, because of the care and attention afforded up front to finding the right people for your business.

Before we get into the benefits, though, let’s quickly define what recruitment process outsourcing is and, just as importantly, what it isn’t.

What Is RPO?

Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is when a company outsources a portion (or all) of their full-time, large-scale recruiting efforts to an external vendor. It’s estimated that the RPO market was around $5.8 billion in 2019 with potential to grow to over $20 billion by 2027.

Once a company outsources their recruiting process, their staffing partner becomes an extension of the company, supporting all parts of recruiting like:

Planning roles needed
Finding candidates
Interviewing
Delivering candidates directly placed into full-time roles
Reporting on the progress of all of these steps

That vendor will exclusively handle filling dozens or hundreds of job requisitions for the company.

“I see a lot of talent acquisition teams under high pressure to meet large-scale hiring goals,” Rachel Ewald, a training director at Insight Global, said. “But finding the time to recruit, interview, cross-compare, onboard, and train is overwhelming when it feels like everyone is already working at maximum capacity.”

“RPO companies should have the resources and expertise to make these seemingly impossible goals, possible,” she continued.

What Does an RPO Company Offer?

RPO is not just simply filling roles for teams on a short-term basis. (That’s what classic staffing and recruiting is for. Insight Global does that, too.) RPO looks at the entire recruiting process and make it a better overall experience for both the candidate and the company.

When a company outsources its recruitment process, the relationship should be about more than just finding people. It should be a strategic partnership, rooted in helping a company accomplish its business goals through strong communication and a shared focus on hiring.

Many vendors offer all-inclusive services within RPO, including:

Consulting services in various areas, such as DE&I and culture
Reporting on business goals
Talent management and optimization
Front-to-back management of recruiting operations

Benefits of RPO for a Business

We briefly mentioned some of the benefits RPO can have for a business earlier. Let’s dig into them now.

It Scales Business Needs

When you need to hire employees—and lots of them—quickly, RPO services provide the infrastructure to make sure those roles are filled in realistic timelines.

Once that infrastructure is in place, it allows the business to grow at any scale needed. It also makes sure employees who are hired are the right ones for your business goals, which helps with overall retention and can cut down on training costs (as you won’t be training multiple people for the same role over the course of the year).

As an added bonus, RPO can drive further cost savings by translating the fixed costs of internal recruiting into a purely variable cost based on demand.

Better Quality Candidates

Businesses may use recruitment process outsourcing because the candidate quality from their current talent acquisition or HR department isn’t fulfilling what the business needs. RPO companies expand a business’ candidate network and help improve that candidate quality. They are subject matter experts when it comes to recruiting and finding talent.

“An RPO company is hired with a subject matter expertise on recruiting strategy, so throughout the partnership, clients will also be able to take away valuable processes, data, and practices that will optimize the organization beyond the duration of the RPO agreement,” Ewald said.

Companies that offer RPO are often experts in the field of the business they work with, too, covering industries like healthcare, IT, and more.

Improves the Recruitment Process

Part of what RPO services also provide is an opportunity to find out what recruiting and onboarding processes need improvement. This process is followed all the way from the diagnostic level to actual implementation of the needed improvements. Typically, companies offering RPO services use various technologies and tooling enhancements—built by the companies themselves or leveraging existing technologies—to improve overall efficiency in the recruitment process.

Ewald said that “providing a positive candidate experience is crucial to enhancing new employee engagement and improving employee retention.” After a company finds a candidate and they accept a job offer, if their onboarding process—from initial training to making sure they get paid on time and in the right place—is off, it can result in a candidate leaving the company. They may not have picked the right person to offer the job to in the first place, either. High turnover among new employees then trickles down to tenured employees who are affected by the attrition.

RPO services help shore up all of these hiring processes.

Allows HR to do HR Things

Human resources departments are often burdened with being the recruiting team—on top of other vital business functions like payroll, benefits, training, policy improvements, and other components of the employee journey. If an HR team is understaffed or undertrained, it can affect the talent being brought into the organization.

RPO services take recruiting responsibility on for HR teams, freeing them up to focus on other core needs of the employee experience. They can alleviate up to 90% of administrative work surrounding hiring and onboarding.

Better Experiences for Candidates

If a company’s recruiting arm is lacking in any area, it can affect the candidate experience and, in turn, the candidate’s perception of the company. Outsourcing that recruiting process—from initial contact to onboarding—and making it a more efficient, enjoyable affair for the candidate can lead to more engaged employees who want to grow along with the company.

“When you feel cared about by your future employer,” Ewald observed, “you show up your first day more connected to the company mission, your new team, and your new manager.”

On the employer side, a better candidate experience helps a company’s ability to hire employees and increases retention down the line with more engaged employees.

Evergreen Can Help with Your RPO Needs

Evergreen offers multiple tiers of RPO services—from job requisition prioritization and identifying stakeholders all the way to end-to-end process improvements and reporting—to enhance workflows, improve reporting, optimize costs, and more.