Outsourcing

Outsourcing

Tom Waddell
When people think about outsourcing in recruitment many immediately consider it to be only for large, complex businesses with contracts worth millions, it is typically known as Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) and involves a business transferring all or part of its recruitment process to an external partner, whilst it is certainly used by large, complex businesses it plays an important part in small organisations as it offers a number of key benefits.

Reduced cost

One of the key benefits of outsourcing is its cost-effectiveness, and it is often the primary motivation. Many companies see their recruitment costs spiral with expensive permanent staff, head-hunters, job boards and high staff turn-over adding to costs. Outsourcing provides a flexible solution and is based, indeed judged, on efficient turnaround, reduced cost and improved quality of hire.

Reduced time-to-hire

One of the biggest issues in a recruitment process is a lengthy time-to-hire. Poorly managed recruitment inevitably increases time-to-hire as interviews drag on and good candidates take other offers or simply remove themselves from the process in favour of other opportunities. This leads to wasted time, effort and money with little to show but vacant job roles and a damaged reputation.

Utilising external support puts focus and urgency at the heart of the process, gets rid of internal distractions and bad practice allowing greater emphasis on filling the position to the satisfaction of all parties.

Improved candidate quality

The right candidate is not just one whose skills and experience look right on paper. There are many factors that go into finding and attracting the right person for the role. The outsourced provider has the resources and skills to search far and wide for the person who is the right fit. In addition, they will ensure every candidate goes through the same process ensuring fairness and transparency and will always make sure every candidate is notified of their application status, important for maintaining employer branding and reputation.

All too often internal recruiters use the same old methods with the same predictable results, usually because they have too much on the go or lack the expertise in a particular sector to implement new ideas. For example I ran a team of 12 internal recruiters covering a huge range of role types in different market sectors but I also outsourced some functions to experts where my team lacked the experience and knowledge to find the right people, this took some pressure of the team, allowing them to focus on their core roles , whilst at the same time the external business used their skills to find the niche people we often struggled to find ourselves.

I also brought in an expert on the CRM I inherited, knowledge was poor and was simply diluted every time someone new started, to the point the team were utilising hardly any of the functionality and had implemented workarounds (often taking much longer) to solve problems. It was not a system I had used before so was unlikely to add much value, a 1 day training course soon had everyone working far more efficiently with the candidate experience greatly improved in terms of speed and communication.

Just 2 examples where someone from outside your business can add much needed value.

If you have recruitment needs and want to discuss how outsourcing could work for you, give me a call on 07960 354441.