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Is recruiting and hiring your domain within the HR world? Then listen up – there’s a new trend disrupting the industry, and it’s one you’ll want to jump on to strengthen your understanding of recruiting and hiring. It’s called total talent management (TTM) and it will give you the ability to build a diverse and flexible workforce you can mobilize when needed.  

If you’re in hiring or workforce planning, you know that the typical recruiting process looks something like this: 

You have an opening, you write a job description, post it on job boards and social media, and hope that a qualified, skilled, and experienced individual applies. You might even reach out to a few people on LinkedIn hoping to find a qualified candidate.

Either way, you’ll probably spend a lot of effort, not to mention money to fulfil your hiring needs, and you might not even find the right candidate. Wouldn’t a process for streamlining and standardizing recruitment come in handy for HR professionals?

This is where recruitment process outsourcing, or RPO, comes in.

What Is Recruitment Process Outsourcing?

In simple terms, recruitment process outsourcing is hiring an external company or service provider to carry out your recruitment process.

But rather than just helping you fill empty positions, either temporary or long-term, RPO recruiting providers can help you tear down and rebuild your talent acquisition strategy so you find and hire more and better people that will stay with your organization.

RPO recruitment works best with an integrated and overarching strategy to recruit candidates with the best skills, qualifications, and culture fit.  

Related Read: 10 Best Pre-Employment Testing Software for Evaluating Potential Staff

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Recruitment Process Outsourcing Benefits

There are many benefits to recruitment process outsourcing, both in the short and long term for your business.

  • You’ll save time and money. By having someone else carry out your recruiting process for you, you’ll have more time to focus on other HR processes, like training and development. Plus, you’ll cut down on the recruitment cost associated with conducting interviews or losing a new hire because they weren’t the right fit.
  • More flexibility in your recruiting process. Recruitment process outsourcing is designed to be flexible to your changing office environment, culture, values, and any other factors you find important for a qualified talent. You may not have as much control over recruiting as you would in-house, but you can work closely with your RPO provider to find the best talent acquisition process.
  • Hires will be better in quality and longevity. A major strength of recruitment process outsourcing is that RPO firms have the resources to dedicate to recruiting and screening. They’ll ensure candidate pools are aligned with your company’s values, goals, and office culture, so when you do hire a candidate, you can feel confident that they will stick around long term.
  • Recruitment process outsourcing can help with total talent management. Outsourcing your recruiting process also means outsourcing the ways you mobilize and find talent within your organization – whether it is full-time, part-time, or temporary employees, or even freelancers or project-specific workers. Sound familiar to the description of total talent management above? That’s because it is.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing Companies

There are lots of recruitment outsourcing companies, all offering a variety of options depending on your recruiting needs. Here’s a good list of organizations within the RPO industry to get started on your research.

  1. Alexander Mann Solutions – This is a global RPO firm that provides recruiting process outsourcing, consulting services, and a network of partners for clients depending on the services they require.
  2. Workforce Logiq – This RPO firm offers a variety of solutions for recruitment process outsourcing, including project RPO, selective RPO, and recruiter on-demand services.
  3. Randstad Sourceright – This company has a team of RPO consultants that offer help building talent acquisition solutions for full-time employees, total talent management, and alternative and contingent workforce.
  4. Allegis Global Solutions – This RPO firm offers both recruitment process outsourcing and procurement solutions that are flexible and adjustable to client needs.
  5. Korn Ferry – This talent acquisition company offers not only recruitment process outsourcing, but other HR processes and programs, such as employee engagement, employee reward programs, and succession management.
  6. Cielo – Cielo is an RPO firm that specializes in recruitment process outsourcing and total talent acquisition.
  7. PeopleScout – The RPO consultants at PeopleScout offer recruitment process outsourcing, managed service provider solutions, and workforce planning solutions.

Related read: Best Recruitment Process Outsourcing Companies

How Does an RPO Model Work?

An RPO model usually works like this: a company decides it needs help recruiting. This could be for a number of reasons: they might be having trouble attracting the right candidates, they might be spending a lot of time and effort for a very small return on investment, or they might not have enough time to dedicate to doing recruiting right. 

Whatever the reason, the company will conduct research into the recruitment process outsourcing firms to find the best fit. 

Once they find one, the RPO provider takes over. They’ll look at:

  • What the company is currently doing in terms of recruiting;
  • What kind of candidates they are looking for; and
  • How to reach those candidates.

Depending on the company’s needs, the RPO can work within existing recruitment processes and optimize them, or create an entirely new recruitment process.

The RPO provider might carry out the recruiting process themselves, or help the company implement it.

As well as specialist RPO firms, recruitment can also be undertaken by professional employer organizations (PEO) and, for hiring international workers in particular an employer of record (EOR).

For help here, check out our shortlists of the best PEO providers and best EOR service providers.

How Is The RPO Process Different From The Typical Recruiting Process?

The major difference between RPO and traditional recruiting is that recruitment process outsourcing can provide a more strategic and overarching approach than the traditional approach of writing a job description and posting it online.

An outside recruitment process outsourcing firm will be able to tailor the recruiting process to candidate skills, qualifications, values, and whether they will fit into the office culture, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach.

What is Total Talent Management?

Total talent management includes all employees and resources in your organization, which goes beyond regular full-time workers.

Your talent management strategy should take into account part-time employees, temporary employees, freelancers, and gig workers, and might even include AI or automation, depending on how heavily your company relies on these technologies for certain tasks.

With self-employed workers in the USA projected to surpass 42 million this year, freelancers will factor into your total talent management strategy more and more (Deloitte).

TTM is the way you mobilize your employees and alternative workforce and their skills and qualifications across your organization to get work done more efficiently and effectively. Recruitment process outsourcing can help ensure that all workers, regardless of employment status, are the right fit.

Your total talent management strategy will work best when supplemented by recruitment process outsourcing, as your organization will have access to a customized recruitment process for finding even the right freelancers. Total talent management should factor in other HR talent acquisition processes, including human capital management

According to Michael Wachholz of Alexander Mann Solutions, 

“A joined-up approach that leverages the best of both permanent and non-permanent talent engagement and acquisition strategies provides a consistent process for all candidates and gives organizations broader access to a fluid talent community.” 

Michael Wachholz

Make sure you use this to your organization’s advantage.

How About An Example Of Total Talent Management?

Talent and acquisition departments have a difficult job, one that can be made easier through a total talent management philosophy supplemented by recruitment process outsourcing.

Here’s one start-up’s success story. In their case, total talent management provided a huge benefit to their workforce and contributed to overall business growth.

Related read: Best Global HR Services Providers

Final Thoughts

If your organization has not implemented a total talent management strategy yet, jump on the trend soon, so your organization is not left behind as others scoop the candidates you’re looking for. 

With the help of recruitment process outsourcing, you’ll be able to work towards a concrete strategy for recruiting workers with applicable skills and qualifications at all levels of employment status. With a total talent management strategy, you will be able to complete work more efficiently and effectively and mobilize talent, whether a project or initiative requires a full-time employee, temporary employee, freelancer, or a mix. 

Not quite what you're looking for? Check our list out of the 10 Best Online Recruitment Software. Or, if you're working with a tight budget, you may find what you're looking for in our list of the Best Recruitment Software for Small Businesses too.

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By Finn Bartram

Finn is an editor at People Managing People. He's passionate about growing organizations where people are empowered to continuously improve and genuinely enjoy coming to work. If not at his desk, you can find him playing sports or enjoying the great outdoors.