Recruitment Process Outsourcing – how to convince your boss

You’ve probably come across the term ‘recruitment process outsourcing’, otherwise known as RPO. You may even have considered proposing it for the temporary workforce in your organisation. Either way, actually convincing those holding the purse string that moving to RPO is a good idea can be a real challenge. It’s a decision that may involve lots of different stakeholders. Here’s our guide of how to make the case for using RPO as an effective way to solve key business challenges.

Visibility and control

RPO companies specialise in ensuring agencies adhere to best practices using expertise and systems that ensure the right people are found quickly, efficiently, and use technology to keep abreast of exactly what is happening at all times. They are more than just a service provider; they’re a strategic partner that understands your business. They can adapt hiring to suit your needs as they change, and take the time to fully understand your pressures and constraints. This enables them to provide a tailored service that fits with your objectives and provide insight into costs that gives you more power to manage your business more effectively.

Cost savings

RPO companies can provide on-going cost savings of between 6% and 12%. They do this by taking the burden off your supply chain and only employing tried and trusted agencies, then continually benchmarking their performance. This removes over charges, over payments, regional inconsistencies in pay levels, ensures market rates and central invoicing.

They look at your supply chain and invoices to see how much you are spending, who you are spending it with, and where you are spending it. They then improve value for money and cost-efficiencies by establishing consistent pay and charge rates, and one single consolidated weekly invoice, regardless of how many agencies you use. This not only makes running your business simpler and more efficient, it will save you a considerable amount of money.

Improved performance

RPO providers build relationships with hiring managers, so they understand your exact labour requirements at all times. It also gives you one single point of contact for all areas of agency labour. They then use performance-led SLAs to drive results. Whatever your company’s staffing needs, RPO means scalable, flexible and cost-effective recruitment utilising sophisticated technology to keep track of every aspect of the process, and offers unrivalled recruitment expertise.

Because RPO gives you the ability to control the scope and cost of your recruitment, you can scale up or down quickly without incurring any fixed long-term cost and always fulfil vacancies within agreed timescales.

Supplier management

Moving away from master vendor agreements means losing a fundamental flaw – master vendors prefer to use their own (often inefficient) services as much as possible. For a truly vendor neutral service that ensures consistency in processes and a level playing field for agencies, you need an independent RPO provider. They manage the agencies to ensure best practices through regular audits, and work with suppliers to help them continually improve and build on their service provision.

Compliance

RPO providers take internal and external compliance very seriously, and are specialists in navigating the continually changing landscape of compliance. This means that you can relax knowing you are in safe hands, as all compliance is completely managed for you, by them. This significantly helps reduce the risk to you of litigation. By ensuring compliance to working standards and ensuring up-to-date regulatory requirements, RPO providers help you avoid potentially costly fines.

Brand and culture

RPO providers have the expertise to improve your company's employer brand by managing the entire experience for candidates and employees to give them a good impression of the business. This ensures consistency across nationwide hiring campaigns ensuring minimum standards are met across the hiring experience. Plus, they are always on hand to support you in projecting the image you want for your business.

Clear benefits

RPO is quite simply the most cost-effective approach to temporary recruitment outsourcing. If you have a large temporary labour spend, RPO can make a huge difference, give you a real advantage and help you take control of this area of your business. It provides savings without compromising on quality, allows hiring of the best talent quickly and at the right price, and makes your temporary and contract workforce well managed and compliant while offering great flexibility and excellent value for money.

RPO allows you to take more control over your staffing using experts who can save you time, money and effort, with proven cost cutting, improved efficiencies and ongoing, measurable results – use these core benefits to help convince your boss that RPO is the solution for recruitment outsourcing.

To gain a deeper understanding of RPO and how it could tranform your business download our guide to harnessing RPO technology.