Guest Post By Lamees Abourahma, RPOA Executive Director
Lamees Abourahma is the Executive Director of the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association (RPOA). She’s passionate about serving the RPO community and elevating RPO status in the business and talent acquisition communities. In 2016, Lamees led the RPOA through a complete transformation by creating a new membership structure and recruiting a new leadership team. Together with her small and mighty team, she’s building innovative membership programs under the guidance of the advisory team. Lamees is a life learner. She’s a Dale Carnegie and Toastmasters award winner. Her recent hobbies include painting, golfing, learning Spanish, and improving.
Top talent in an organization is one of the most crucial competitive advantages in determining its success. Take our 20 best people away, and I tell you that Microsoft would become an unimportant company, said Bill Gates. When hiring top talent, organizations face a growing and evolving set of hiring challenges.
Since the onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020, hiring demands fluctuated dramatically to meet business demand. As peoples’ priorities changed, we experienced the Great Resignation and the rise of the gig economy. Candidate behavior changed with more people expecting flexible work from home and higher pay. Remote work allowed employers to expand their recruiting geographies outside their local boundaries. Global businesses adapted to hiring talent with different cultures, languages, and employment laws. Compound that with the need to hire a diverse workforce and manage talent technology, and you’ll have a sense of the complexity of today’s hiring environment. With the increased complexity of hiring, recruitment process outsourcing has emerged as a strategic talent acquisition solution.
During my twelve-year tenure with the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association (RPOA), I witnessed the exciting evolution of this industry. Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) has emerged to offer valuable hiring solutions for diversity hiring, internal mobility, employer branding, technology optimization, talent market intelligence, and business advisory.
This article delves into the various scenarios where utilizing RPO services can prove to be advantageous, exploring how RPO can revolutionize recruitment and foster sustainable growth for businesses.
Scaling Hiring to Meet Business Growth
When a company experiences rapid growth or expansion, it faces the challenge of finding and onboarding a significant number of qualified employees quickly. At the onset of the covid pandemic in 2020, organizations experienced a sudden hiring freeze followed by a steep spike to meet pent-up demands. Scaling up the recruitment process internally can be time-consuming, resource-intensive, and often result in inefficiencies. RPO services offer a flexible hiring solution that flexes up or down to meet hiring demands. RPO providers have specialized expertise, resources, and technology to tap into a vast talent pool, ensuring that the organization has the right people in place to meet the increased demand without compromising quality or adding fixed costs.
Supporting Diversity Hiring
Research shows a strong correlation between workplace diversity and financial outperformance. According to a 2019 McKinsey study, top-quartile companies with ethnic and cultural diversity outperformed those in the fourth one by 36 percent in profitability. Finding diverse candidates with the required expertise and experience can be particularly challenging. RPO service providers often have access to talent pools that encompass candidates with varying demographics. By leveraging RPO services, companies can access a broader talent pool, increasing the likelihood of finding the perfect fit for a diverse workforce.
Enhancing Employer Branding
The United States economy has experienced a strong post-pandemic labor market, with hundreds of thousands of jobs added every month and unemployment reaching a record low of 3.4 percent. In such a tight labor market, an employer’s reputation plays a significant role in attracting top talent. Candidates often seek information about an organization’s culture and work environment before considering a job offer. Modern RPO evolved to include recruitment marketing services that strengthen an employer’s brand and improves candidate attraction. RPO providers typically recruit under an employer’s brand providing a seamless and positive candidate experience throughout the recruitment journey.
Implementing Internal mobility
Filling skill gaps by upskilling and reskilling internal talent within an organization can also be extremely beneficial in combating a tight talent market and meeting hiring needs. This allows organizations to fill in jobs by looking internally into their workforce, therefore making internal mobility an effective hiring approach. Gartner research shows that only 33% of employees seeking a new role looked internally at their own employer first. They contributed three inequities to driving employees out of the internal labor market: awareness, access, and support. As recruiting experts, RPO providers possess core competencies to support an organization’s internal mobility. RPO solutions can be customized to meet hiring needs using internal and external sources.
Adopting and Optimizing Talent Technology
With the recent rise of artificial intelligence, organizations need to figure out how best to integrate such technology in the workplace. “A system solution changes a workflow, disrupting old ways of doing things and generating new ones,” say the authors of the book Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence. The authors argue that the key to adjusting is figuring out how to redesign our economic systems to engage the working population fully. Not a trivial challenge.
According to a recent research by PEW Research, 47% of Americans think AI would do better than humans at evaluating all job applicants without bias. At the same time, the study found that the majorities oppose employers using AI in making final hiring decisions or tracking employees’ movements.
Learning new technologies and staying current with upgrades and research can be resource-draining for internal recruiting teams. Alternatively, organizations can work with their RPO partners to optimize existing technology or bring new ones to keep them highly competitive.
Overall Hiring Strategy and Business Alignment
According to PROA 2022 RPO Value Insight Study, as RPO relationships mature over time, they evolve into more strategic partnerships. RPO providers become trusted advisors to their clients, helping them align their business objectives with their hiring objectives. This finding was also supported by other research. In their 2023 State of Global RPO panel, Everest Group stated that there is an increased demand for strategic talent acquisition services across the market, with North America at the forefront of the global trend.
Market Intelligence
Access to market data empowers organizations in making informed hiring decisions. Insights on the best geographies or demographics for hiring certain roles can guide recruiting activities and improve hiring results. Salary benchmark data can help employers stay competitive in the marketplace. Everest Group found that RPO providers are investing significantly in data and analytics capabilities and expanding their services into skill gap analysis, industry-specific benchmarks, and compensation and employee benefits, among other talent market intelligence.
Conclusion
Recruitment process outsourcing has become a strategic choice for many forward-thinking organizations seeking to optimize their hiring processes, boost efficiency, and improve talent acquisition outcomes. Whether scaling up rapidly, hiring a diverse workforce, enhancing employer brand, supporting internal mobility, optimizing technology, aligning business and hiring strategies, or offering deep market intelligence, RPO services offer a myriad of advantages that can drive sustainable growth and success for businesses. By partnering with reputable RPO providers, companies can harness cutting-edge recruitment methodologies, advanced technology, and industry-specific knowledge to build a resilient and skilled workforce ready to tackle the challenges of tomorrow’s hiring environment.