In a competitive labor market, a majority of organizations are seeking support to fill their open vacancies with top talent since they want to remain productive and competitive. There may be a vast number of staffing services in the market, but the two most common models are recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), and using traditional staffing agencies.
The latter is a less flexible model that a majority of companies are avoiding these days because it’s mainly suited for one-time hires. Here are seven benefits that support the use of RPO over using traditional staffing agencies:
1. Better partnership
An RPO team is more like an extension of your in-house team, and they work with you to create a reliable talent acquisition program. Working with an RPO company offers profound benefits such as quicker times to hire, improved candidate quality, and more. These professionals are strategically connected to your company and they may even sit on-site. In most cases, they work remotely or may even be based offshore, and will communicate using your company name.
RPO experts are keen on understanding your business deeply, thus finding it easier to help you meet your current and future hiring needs. What’s more, their knowledge of your organization means that they can represent your brand better in all the markets where you’re seeking to source talent.
You don’t get such close relationships with recruitment agencies.
2. Talent pooling
Another major benefit of RPO partners is that they create talent pools that will almost always have the candidate that you are looking for. With lots of active and passive candidates in the talent pool, it becomes easier and faster to find the right candidate whenever a vacancy comes up within your organization.
Agencies, on the other hand, employ a reactive model that focuses on filling a specific position and ending it at that point. They may have a pool of candidates, but such a pool won’t be created with your company in mind.
3. Hiring process improvements
Since an RPO recruiter is working as part of your team, they will want to improve the recruitment process of your company to facilitate a smoother process, next time there’s a vacancy to be filled. They will assess your current hiring processes, and identify the practices that work and the ones that are inefficient while being keen to make recommendations that make use of best practices.
Staffing agencies are not intent on improving your general staffing process, since they work on a hire-to-hire basis.
4. Talent advisory
Whenever you work with an RPO recruiter, you can expect them to offer additional value to your hiring process through talent advisory services such as assessment services, candidate communications, employer branding, talent acquisition strategies, labor market insights, and more. Such capabilities will place your company in a better position to attract and recruit as well as retain top talent in a competitive hiring environment.
It’s quite different for staffing agencies who will only post ads for your vacant positions and promote these vacancies using their own employer brand. Moreover, a majority of these companies lack the expertise to offer talent advisory consulting.
There you have it
These are only four reasons why RPO recruiters are superior to staffing agencies – there are lots of additional reasons. Keep in mind that each hiring model will be suitable depending on your unique hiring needs, so be sure to consider your objectives before making a decision.
