Why is RPO (Outsourcing) More Important in the Post Covid-19 World?

Many employers ask ‘why RPO matters’. The answer is that RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) matters during these tough times of the pandemic more than ever.

RPO is not a new recruitment concept. It has been around for over a decade now. And, never has it found more significance than now when companies are facing a huge shortage of staff because of the massive layoffs. This is happening due to the economic slowdown created by the pandemic. Furthermore, businesses are also experiencing a huge fluctuation in demand, including periodic bouts of high demand.

This has necessitated the urgent need to recruit staff for the short term to cash in on these bouts of increasing demand. Also, companies have become wary of any kind of long term recruitment during the current crisis and the ever-changing economic dynamics.

In these situations, an RPO firm will help you with effective recruitment by helping you find the right talent for the job. This is why RPO matters. As it can help you hire the best even in these circumstances.

Here in this blog, we will discuss why RPO matters and how it can effectively help you your recruiting needs post the pandemic.

The perfect recruiting solution for the post-pandemic times

The recruiting landscape looks dull at the moment. Talent acquisition and HR teams across different companies would have seen their team numbers reduce as a result of the widespread cuts experienced across different sectors due to the slow economy. This shortage of recruiting manpower will create many problems in hiring and human resource management when the companies start to ramp up operations again after business picks up once again.

But there are pressing questions for the industry, which are not just linked with economic recovery and unemployment.

• How can your talent acquisition and human resource teams, with their limited manpower, become proactive in handling the fluctuating recruiting costs and demands?
• How can you make your recruiting process more efficient and also enhance your candidate experience?

If you are still wondering why RPO matters, here’s why. In these testing circumstances, RPO services could fill in the gaps and add actual value and expertise to your recruitment efforts. RPO providers focus on creating long term strategic partnerships, which goes beyond sourcing and recruitment.

This means that the RPO focuses on becoming your strategic recruiting partner, one that will invest in learning the culture and values of your company and will provide you with better recruitment results, which would be far-reaching.

Solving the immediate challenges

By associating with an RPO firm, you could bring more clarity to the recruiting process. This would help you find solutions to many of the immediate challenges posed by COVID-19. An RPO firm can offer the following:

• Outsourced support to businesses that were forced to cut down their internal HR and talent acquisition staff due to the pandemic.
• Assistance to scale up operations for the resilient and disruptive industries, which have thrived in the pandemic, for eg., startups and tech vendors.
• Goal-oriented consultancy for companies who intend to review, modify or redefine the human resource strategies for the future.

How can you benefit by partnering with an RPO service provider?

• You will be able to meet your unpredictable talent requirements.
• An RPO will help you with effective workforce planning.
• RPOs help you provide a positive and consistent candidate experience.
• They will help you precisely define what a quality hire is.
• They will help you align the recruitment strategy to match your business model and strategy.
• RPOs will help you overcome business uncertainties, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and help you implement the necessary changes for sustainability.
• An RPO will help you change your entire recruitment process, making it more efficient.
• RPOs will help you to effectively measure your success.
• They will help you engage in a successful long term recruiting partnership.
• An RPO will help you understand and estimate your actual recruitment and talent acquisition expenditure.

The agile nature of RPO providers and their use of cutting edge technology is the reason why many businesses, small or large alike, are partnering with RPO firms to attract, recruit and retain the right talent.

Creating a flexible recruitment strategy

Under the usual circumstances too, a company needs to scale up or scale down their recruiting process to instantly meet the irregular or fluctuating demands of the market. For some companies, the current pandemic situation, however, has drastically increased the need for efficient recruitment processes. The challenge here is to recruit effectively and rapidly without exposing the candidates or the recruiters at risk of contracting the virus. The RPO firm could provide an on-demand recruitment strategy for the company to effectively respond to this unexpected increase in the recruiting needs during a contagious pandemic.

With this on-demand recruitment strategy, recruiters from the RPO firm will become an extended arm to your inhouse team. The recruiter would try to know more about the organization, its processes, objectives and desired goals. This kind of strategy frees your inhouse employees and allows them to redirect their focus on urgent business matters. When the recruiting needs decrease, the RPO could be scaled down easily without making any changes to your internal hiring resources. RPOs are onboarded for recruitment as they provide businesses with a flexible hiring model for the fluctuating recruiting demands.

Leverage alternate sourcing channels

Specialised industries, such as healthcare, generally depend on individuals with specific skills. Due to the pandemic, healthcare centres and hospitals are hugely short-staffed. The RPO firm leverages the underutilised sourcing channels of the healthcare industry to access qualified candidates. These alternate sourcing channels could include healthcare professionals and trained nurses that are unemployed temporarily.

The RPO recruiter will access these channels as an associate of the organization and source the right candidates for the job. This strategy doesn’t just enforce the brand of the employer, it helps to find the most qualified candidate, irrespective of the source.

With the help of this kind of strategy, the organization will be able to create a pipeline of talented candidates for their open job positions. According to a leading advisory company, organizations that do not partner with RPO service providers are 59% less likely to establish a credible pipeline of talent for their vacant job positions.

Improves the quality of recruits

The RPO firm provides more outreach to the company, which increases its bandwidth. Therefore, the company now has access to a larger group of eligible candidates, out of which, it can select the most talented ones. According to one of the latest surveys by an advisory firm, over 50% of the new hires of an organization utilising the services of an RPO firm, were of excellent quality. The RPO service provider assesses all the eligible candidates, ensuring that they possess the core skills, motivation and competencies required for their role. This greatly improves the quality of candidates that get hired by the company.

Virtual interviews and onboarding

This pandemic has limited human movement across the globe. Also, as the pandemic continues to spread its footprint in the country, conducting face-to-face personal interviews have become riskier. Plus, with more and more companies asking their employees to work from home, companies are facing a challenge with onboarding their new hires.

An RPO firm has access to the latest recruitment technologies. When you partner with it, you can take advantage of their tech to conduct virtual interviews online. This way both your staff and the candidates can be part of the interview by staying within their safe zones. You can arrange for all the members together virtually via video conferencing to welcome the new hire into the team. This way, you can create a nice candidate experience despite unfavourable conditions.

Help survive the pandemic and thrive

RPO firms generally partner with businesses that need instant assistance for their recruitment needs. This partnership helps the company greatly, as RPO service providers have created specific recruitment methods to especially meet such a demand. RPO firms are accustomed to the short and long term, result-oriented recruitment models. Using their expertise and recruitment tech, they tap the talent pool efficiently. This is why RPO firms are the best partners to assist you with the irregular or fluctuating recruiting needs during the pandemic. The kind of support that the RPO will provide with your short-term requirements will help you reap benefits in the long term, long past this pandemic crisis.

An RPO will not just help find you a candidate, they will ensure that you get the best recruits by following the due recruitment process, physically or virtually, despite your limited in-house hiring resources.