In the realm of talent acquisition, Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) providers stand out for their flexibility and scalability, often becoming the go-to solution when big results are needed quickly. While RPOs accentuate their ability to swiftly benefit companies, reducing costs and making an immediate impact, their long-term influence on internal hiring teams is often overlooked.
Whether they’re Talent Sourcers, Talent Acquisition Partners or Talent Coordinators, RPO employees are first and foremost – consultants. Beyond delivering a steady stream of high-quality candidates – their role is to advise, optimize and share knowledge in order to ensure your company’s long-term success.
They can do this by:
- Exposing your employees to experiences and insights coming from a diverse pool of experts
- Providing up-to-date market insights, ensuring that your teams have a realistic view of the market
- Helping you choose the right recruitment tools
- Enhancing your stakeholder management efforts
- Pushing your team to strive for excellence through friendly competition
- Assisting your team in developing talent acquisition metrics and benchmarks to guide future processes
Table of contents:
- Leveraging RPO’s Diverse Pool of Expertise
- Gaining a Realistic View of the Market
- Getting Access to Cutting-Edge Tools
- Enhancing Your Stakeholder Management
- Fostering High-Performing Teams through Cooperative Competition
- Ensuring Data-Driven Decision Making
1. Leveraging RPO’s Diverse Pool of Expertise
Partnering with an RPO company grants companies access to a wealth of expertise extending beyond individual Talent Sourcers or Talent Acquisition Partners. Within many RPO organizations, consultants boast diverse backgrounds, spanning from in-house talent acquisition specialists to seasoned agency recruiters and independent freelancers. This diversity of experience might encompass a wide spectrum of industries, from traditional sectors like FMCG to cutting-edge domains such as blockchain technology, as well as project types, from mass recruitment to headhunting for C-level roles.
When a company partners with an RPO consultancy, they not only benefit from the specialized skills of their chosen expert(s) but also gain access to the collective knowledge of the entire RPO organization.
At Tribe.xyz, selflessness is one of our core values, and it goes well beyond sharing knowledge inside our organization. When embedded within a client’s internal recruitment team, we actively facilitate knowledge exchange through workshops, mentoring sessions, and the creation of comprehensive knowledge repositories. By sharing insights and experiences from our diverse pool of experts, we empower internal recruitment teams to overcome challenges and optimize processes for long-term success.
2. Gaining a Realistic View of the Market
Crafting successful recruitment strategies requires a proactive approach that embraces new insights and industry trends as they emerge. RPOs keep their finger on the pulse of the market, ensuring recruitment decisions are grounded in accurate, up-to-date market data.
At Tribe.xyz, key market insights are shared during our company-wide team meetings, covering topics such as recent startup fundings, company layoffs, and remote work trends. Our #learningandsharing Slack channel serves as a repository for sharing valuable insights gathered by our consultants – whether they were gathered by attending industry events, reading articles, or through firsthand interactions with the candidates.
Moreover, our in-house products enable us to track and analyze data from all our recruitment processes in real time, providing information on salary expectations, remote work preferences, and candidate drop-off rates, thereby ensuring both our consultants and clients remain well-informed about market trends and insights.
3. Getting Access to Cutting-Edge Tools
RPOs leverage a diverse array of tools to streamline the recruitment process, from Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms to AI-driven solutions for sourcing and candidate communication.
Through a comprehensive assessment of their clients’ needs, RPOs serve as strategic partners in selecting the most suitable tools. They can perform vendor evaluations, having in mind customization requirements and implementation complexity, support user training and onboarding, and provide ongoing monitoring and optimization of chosen tools in order to maximize their effectiveness.
One tool that we’re particularly fond of at Tribe.xyz is Kamila.ai, an AI engine that allows us to automate the most cumbersome part of hiring – sourcing. By cutting down the time spent doing repetitive tasks, we can dedicate more time to enhancing candidate experiences and fostering strong relationships with our client’s internal teams instead!
4. Enhancing your Stakeholder Management
As embedded recruiters, RPO consultants are deeply involved not only with the client’s internal recruitment team but also with their Hiring Managers and other relevant stakeholders. Whether they’re serving as a Hiring Manager for the first time, or are seasoned executives with extensive recruitment experience, these stakeholders might rely on RPO consultants to address critical questions such as:
- Is our salary truly competitive?
- Why are so many candidates refusing to work on-site?
- Why do so many candidates drop out after successfully going through several interviews?
RPO consultants excel in identifying and addressing these bottlenecks.
Stakeholder management roundtables are a core component of Tribe Academy, our monthly sessions focus on upskilling our consultants. These sessions ensure that our consultants are well-equipped to address any questions or concerns raised by stakeholders. Additionally, our dedicated team of Talent Coordinators specializes in streamlining communication between candidates, recruiters, and Hiring Managers, thereby ensuring that candidate and internal stakeholder experience is not only an afterthought but a full-on service in its own right!
Most importantly, by shouldering the responsibility of delivering a steady stream of high-quality candidates, RPO consultants alleviate the workload of internal recruitment teams. This allows internal recruiters to concentrate on fostering robust relationships with their stakeholders, ultimately contributing to long-term hiring success.
5. Fostering High-Performing Teams through Cooperative Competition
Cooperative competition, or co-opetition, occurs when two entities collaborate towards achieving a shared goal, despite being competitors in one way or another. In the realm of recruitment, this dynamic often emerges when companies with existing internal recruitment teams seek external assistance, inevitably leading to comparisons between internal and external efforts. Naturally, questions arise:
- Is this freelancer/agency/RPO worth the investment we’re making?
- Could my team achieve similar results on their own?
Competition between teams certainly has its pros and cons.
However, by fostering a spirit of cooperation between internal and external employees, organizations can harness the benefits of competitive dynamics while mitigating the associated risks.
At Tribe.xyz, we mitigate the downsides of competitiveness through several strategies:
- Our consultants are fully embedded in the client’s team, allowing us to understand the intricacies of your business model and absorb your culture, ensuring we always have your company’s best interests in mind
- We adopt a flat monthly rate model, focusing on providing maximum business value rather than fixating solely on the number of hires made
- We prioritize selflessness in all interactions, gladly sharing our expertise and insights with our clients
6. Ensuring Data-Driven Decision Making
To ensure transparency and progress tracking, companies often rely on a well-defined set of talent acquisition metrics. RPOs oftentimes focus on even smaller chunks of information, such as “Time to find a hire” and “Number of candidates sourced needed to make a hire”. Tailored to the client’s specific requirements, RPOs can assist in crafting an appropriate set of metrics along with guidelines on how data should be collected, analyzed and interpreted.
At Tribe.xyz, we make sure to keep track of all relevant metrics, and not only use them as a selling point for our services, but as an ongoing source of information which influences the way we approach different roles.
- Why did we have to source 3x more candidates than we usually need to make a hire?
- Are candidates doing great in the early stages, but suddenly seem to drop out after the technical interview?
- Are we finding great candidates, but offers are being rejected more often than usual?
By pairing up industry insights with the real-time data from our dashboards, we’re able to provide a comprehensive bottleneck analysis, offering our clients insights into how their processes compare with market standards.
This approach enables our clients to align their recruitment strategies for optimal pipeline performance across the company, which benefits RPO consultants and internal employees alike.
Conclusion
In conclusion, RPO partnerships offer a flexible solution that helps with both short-term hiring needs and long-term recruitment strategies. Besides just filling immediate roles, RPOs bring in advanced tools, market insights and valuable expertise, enhancing recruitment efforts at every step.
Whether you need someone to step in and “put out a fire” with swift and effective hiring solutions, or you need someone who’ll help you build a solid recruitment system that allows you to tackle your long-term recruitment goals with confidence, Tribe.xyz has got you covered.
Book a free consultation with us today, and we’ll be happy to help you tackle any challenges you might be facing!
