HR saves around one-third on hiring costs when working with recruitment outsourcing companies. Leveraging recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) can lift a lot of work off your HR team's plate. Were you aware that these services offer many other benefits, such as handling many common hiring pain points to get you the staff you need?
Below, we present seven challenges to help you get a handle on the processes RPO providers like Hire Velocity leverage. Before you finish reading, you will understand our methods for getting you the perfect recruits every time. So, dive in to learn how these talent solution partners streamline recruiting and can make your business more efficient.
1. Understanding Client Needs
One of the first challenges RPO companies must handle is discussing and understanding a client's needs. They need to learn about every business's unique demands and limitations before they can work on the hiring process.
To get up to speed, businesses must ensure their communication with clients is clear and transparent. This process can help them learn every nuance of a client's needs so that all their work guides them toward meeting their expectations.
This process often requires several discussions to help the RPO provider learn what is unique about the specific client. Such unique elements tend to include things like:
- How many new hires the client needs
- Any timeline the client has for recruiting
- The client's specific corporate culture
- What objectives or goals the client is trying to meet
- Previous issues the client may have had with other recruiting companies
- Specific talents or skills the client is currently missing
This engagement is not a one-time thing. The RPO service must always ensure that it remains aligned with the intent of the recruitment process. Engaging in several feedback sessions allows them to ensure that their efforts are well-received.
Strategies for Better Client Communication and Aligning Talent Expectations
A recruitment outsourcing company starts an alignment process by creating a detailed job spec. This spec allows a recruiter to leverage their job ad copy expertise while the client expresses precisely what they want in a hire.
Later, when they look at candidates, they can check in with the client, ensuring the resumes they choose overlap with what the client expects. If there is an issue, the RPO group can update its process to ensure future recruits better fit the client's needs.
The client should also be aware of how often these engagements will occur. As such, a shared communications plan between the client and recruiter would ensure both parties know what they can expect from the other.
Of course, if there are issues, the recruitment manager should communicate this as early as possible to allow both parties to resolve it.
2. Candidate Quality and Fit
It is important for every accepted candidate to succeed in hard skills and have the soft skills appropriate for the position, too. A recruiter must assess whether each candidate needs more training in each of these skills to ensure they onboard faster. Also, when potential hires with valuable talents apply, the client should be informed of their existence.
Addressing Skill Gaps and Assessing Candidates for Optimal Talent Matching
A recruitment outsourcing company needs to have a strong understanding of the state of skills in the industry for which it hires. It must know what skill gaps commonly exist to determine whether a hire displays exceptional talent or is falling behind.
Often, they may also be able to offer minor training to recruits by partnering with educational institutions. This allows them to close any talent gap that exists, ensuring every candidate is up-to-speed on the client's needs.
A recruitment outsourcing company must ensure anybody they bring on board has the required skills. As such, it is essential they develop assessment criteria for screening candidates.
By developing criteria, they can perform such a test with minimal fuss, ensuring the process is fast for both recruiter and potential hire. They should also have a robust reference-checking process to allow them to have assurances of the integrity of someone's resume.
During a recruit's early days at a company, an RPO provider can also offer a candidate ongoing learning and professional development. This way, their client can be assured that anyone brought on board will have what it takes to handle the work they are thrown.
Another option for outsourcing companies is to offer trial periods or project-based assessments of any new hire. Judging hires on their output, even after hiring, can prevent a client from the burden of resolving issues that a recruit might raise.
3. Ensuring a High Hiring Speed
Adhering to a client's recruitment timeline is very important. It ensures both the clients' development speed and trust in the recruiter. To this end, reducing time-to-hire metrics is always a fundamental goal.
At the same time, any recruitment process needs to be accurate and bring in the best potential candidates. Thus, it must be both efficient and streamlined, benefiting all parties due to a lack of waste. However, the most significant challenge comes from balancing these speed and quality criteria.
Reducing Time-to-Hire Metrics
While bottlenecks exist across many industries, they are usually due to simple and resolvable issues. Examples include not matching expectations, conflict with traditions, or regulatory requirements. RPOs can often combat slowdowns caused by these issues, though, by using automation and predictive analytics.
A strong hirer will use a system to flag resumes positively or negatively when candidates apply. This system highlights the best candidates to the recruiter faster. It also keeps those with problematic issues out of the running.
Similarly, it is possible to analyze the nature of any specific recruit over time. Doing this can allow a talent acquisition company to build up a database of which traits have been most successful in the company. After this, an RPO business quickly learns who will most likely succeed and can develop a long-term list of potential hires.
Implementing Efficient Recruitment Processes
To further speed up the hiring, RPOs can use several of the following strategies to ensure their methods surpass those of a more general HR team:
- Standardizing job descriptions using templates
- Using an applicant tracking system (ATS) to manage applications
- Train internal recruitment and onboarding personnel on best practices
- Incorporate video interviews into the application process to speed up screening
- Use social media and online job boards to ensure the broadest reach possible
While this list is not exhaustive, it can mitigate many of the most common HR outsourcing issues that might slow down an internal team.
4. Overcoming Technology Adoption Barriers
Adopting advanced recruitment tools can streamline hiring. However, one of the biggest recruitment hurdles in 2024 is ensuring everyone understands what these can do for a team. As such, it is imperative that traditional recruiters receive the training they need to work seamlessly with an RPO provider.
Tools such as ATS, CRMs, and modern AI can ensure that candidates receive the responses they need much faster. So, in addition to training clients to use them effectively, a hiring solutions partner needs to address any resistance they meet.
Methods of combating such resistance do not need to be complicated. They can start with something as simple as involving recruiters in the tech selection process to create a sense of ownership.
Over time, though, recruiters will want to offer training to those who do not understand the system's features. At the same time, they may also want a process to handle those who do not wish to use such a system.
If a recruitment provider offers ongoing support, too, they can help troubleshoot any further issues that arise. This assistance can go a long way toward preventing minor problems from snowballing.
Clear guidelines are often necessary to ensure internal and external recruiters work in sync. These will define who is responsible for which recruitment areas and who can adjust settings within such an online system. This clarity allows everyone to avoid overlap and ensure unity between teams.
More hiring process obstacles that may need resolution include:
- Ensuring data privacy and security with tech use
- How best to use data analytics to track recruitment performance
- The best prompts for training AI in tasks like resume or candidate screening
- Checking for compliance with the use of external tools
After resolving each of these, an external talent recruiter will be able to display a record level of hiring efficiency.
5. Maintaining Employer Brand
As an external company, an RPO company needs to ensure it maintains its client's brand identity at all times. It also needs to balance said branding with its own image when it wishes to be at the forefront of recruiting.
While this can be a challenge, performing it well protects and promotes both companies. Over the long term, it can act as a symbol of unity and a cornerstone of recruiting success as you continue to combine your brands.
Ensuring Consistent Brand Messaging
Early on, the recruitment company needs to ensure they have clear brand guidelines that can help them when engaging in outreach. They may need to run through several rounds of feedback to ensure that it matches expectations.
The hiring company will then need to use this style through all communication. Examples of where this is necessary include job postings, candidate communication, or in any other public space. Doing this will ensure consistency across the board regarding recruiting language.
When balancing the two brands, though, the recruiter needs to start by analyzing both their own guidelines and those of their client. Once they discover the unique facets of either, they can start working on developing copy that communicates both tones. Where one conflicts with the other, they should ensure the client is dominant, but it may be possible to override that with permission.
6. Compliance and Legal Issues
As a talent solutions partner, the role can sometimes mean adhering to complex regulations across borders. For example, the differences between the U.S., Canada, and the EU are vast and may require expertise in both areas. As such, many recruiters ensure that they stay updated on hiring laws, as this is essential to meeting legal standards.
A company will often train its recruiters on compliance whenever a law changes or as a part of an ongoing legal training process. Doing this helps them familiarize themselves with the challenges they must overcome. Legacy processes should receive audits to meet new regulations and prevent issues with existing hires.
An RPO partner often has existing processes to help with these updates and ensure a company follows the law. They will have experience hiring globally, so they can use tried-and-tested methods to ensure compliance. This expertise saves time and ensures a client follows hiring best practices long-term.
7. Diversity and Inclusion Goals
Depending on the company and region in question, diversity and inclusion goals may either be internal or a legal requirement. Meeting these targets is often a primary goal for many companies as it makes them much more appealing to applicants. Despite this, issues can arise when D&I recruiting strategies do not align with local laws.
Outsourcing challenges like these should receive early attention at the start of any partnership. This can help guide the development of criteria a hiring search provider needs to adhere to during the hiring process.
Diversity goals need careful monitoring. The data-gathering process needs to match internal demands and external regulations.
Some of the answers people give may need anonymizing, for example, which may demand the use of specific software. A dedicated RPO company will often have access to tools like these, ensuring the privacy of individuals' answers.
Choosing the Best Recruitment Outsourcing Companies
Hiring Velocity understands the challenges inherent in scalable hiring. Over the years, it has developed recruitment strategies that have repeatedly led to onboarding success. Leveraging decades of expertise and custom RPO solutions, we can tailor our hiring process to meet your specific needs.
Ensure you choose the most effective option when it comes to recruitment outsourcing companies. Contact Hire Velocity today to work with us and overcome your hiring and onboarding difficulties. Streamline your talent acquisition with a partner who can handle any challenge the process throws at them.
