The job of a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider is to optimize their clients' talent acquisition process to ensure they are building a best-in-class workforce while simultaneously providing a seamless candidate experience. RPO experts can create a customized talent acquisition process for each client to attract the right candidates to meet their unique needs. Often, this means crafting and implementing proven practices to improve a company's ability to source, recruit, and hire candidates. A good RPO provider will also provide the right processes and tools to improve the candidate experience at every engagement.
Having a seamless talent acquisition process is a key factor in the hiring and retention of qualified candidates. And although some companies can handle their talent acquisition internally, outsourcing this process to the RPO experts will deliver better results.
8 Ways RPO Providers Optimize the Talent Acquisition Process
There are certain business components that should be evaluated and adapted to overcome your workforce challenges, and talent acquisition is a very important one. Below are eight ways that RPO providers optimize an organization's that process.
1. Calculate the Talent Deficit
To start off, you need to see how your talent acquisition efforts have been performing and if your organization is achieving its talent goals. One way to evaluate this is by calculating your talent deficit. To do so, you could take a look at the total number of open jobs you've had in the past two months and deduct the total number of jobs filled during that period. This should give you a glimpse into how quickly your open roles are being filled, and based on these results you will know if you need to change your talent acquisition strategy.
2. Perform a Skills Assessment
The skills assessment process is how you begin to understand your departmental and organizational needs. This assessment will reveal any gaps in your workforce to uncover target improvement areas. From hiring trends to bottom line savings, having the ability to quantify and qualify workforce skills is step one in determining whether your existing talent acquisition resources can meet your workforce needs. Your strategy can then be altered to meet your newfound needs.
3. Ditch the Recruiting Handbook
Long gone are the days where recruiters could rely solely on jobs boards to fill open positions. The rise of social media, big data, automation, and AI makes finding a needle in a haystack a realistic (and a very much expected) task for recruiters. As the leader of your company’s talent acquisition process, really ask yourself, has your team raised the bar on its recruiting strategies? If you haven't started incorporating technology into your talent acquisition process, it's time to let an RPO provider set it up for you.
4. Build a Talent Community
Unfortunately, many job seekers report that they never hear back from an employer when they apply for an advertised position. This is often due to the fact that some organizations don't have an optimized process in place that prioritizes communication. RPO solutions tend to work best for difficult-to-fill-positions or high-volume jobs, so when candidates who are hard to come by have submitted their information, you need to have a process set up to capture those candidates. So you can bet there's great value in having an established process to capture and maintain a talent pool. RPO providers have the resources to help you communicate effectively with candidates whether you are actively recruiting or not.
5. Develop a Sourcing Strategy for Passive Candidates
The trick to passive candidate sourcing is to build lines of communication into the talent communities you want to attract before you even need them. Passive recruiting will help set your organization ahead of the competition; having a readily accessible candidate pool will ensure that your workforce is always comprised of the best talent on the market. Although building a passive candidate strategy might not seem essential, it is an instrumental part of a successful recruitment program.
6. Focus on Efficiency
It’s important to realize that when candidates end up in long submittal and interview cycles, the likelihood of them accepting the position decreases. What’s worse is when a candidate declines the offer, and the vicious cycle resets. Candidates want efficiency throughout the entire talent acquisition process. The process for getting candidates into your talent pool and eventually through the hiring and onboarding process should be efficient and consistent with your brand. This often means your TA team needs some help from external RPO experts to optimize your talent acquisition lifecycle.
7. Start with Employee Engagement
If your talent acquisition process isn't as seamless as possible, both potential candidates and your workforce suffer. A suboptimal process means longer hours, increased workloads and high-pressure situations for your employees. And a work environment like that leads to unhappy workers with with one foot out the door. Consequently, this adds to the never-ending list of unfilled jobs. So along with improving your talent acquisition process, it's crucial to implement employee engagement strategies to ensure your workforce is happy. An engaged workforce will be more productive and more inclined to build a future at your company.
8. Utilize Your Recruiting Technologies
An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can help an overburdened HR department; however, it’s not a replacement for human interaction and decision-making. Understanding how to use an ATS while also keeping an element of human interaction in your talent acquisition process is a key factor in your hiring success. Learn how to maximize your ATS so that data is accurate, follow-up is complete, and the technology is being leveraged to its fullest potential.
With all of the ways that RPO providers can optimize the talent acquisition process mentioned above, it's likely that your organization will be considering a partnership. If you want more information on RPO services, we've got you covered.
