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RPO-3 points essential for choosing the right vendor
Pallavi Vanacharla
Friday, April 1, 2005
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) has been loosely defined to name several traditional recruitment outsourcing solutions, including recruitment contractors or employment agencies. True RPO differs from both in several ways.

The term RPO defines outsourcing the entire recruitment department, including people, technologies, infrastructure and processes.

One of the key differences is that similar to your employees, recruiters in the RPO solution report to you and provide key performance indicator reports. Traditional outsourcing solutions price their offering based on a percentage of the new hire’s salary, hourly consulting fees or bonuses, which can be variable and add up to a substantial sum.

Contrarily, RPO is a fixed cost solution, like employee salaries, and gives greater control to HR managers and better forecasting of recruitment spending.

In summary, true RPO is a fixed cost solution, which offers expertise, advanced recruitment automation technologies and best practice methodologies, all without any loss of control.

When evaluating RPO vendors, there are three criteria companies should consider Competency, Recruitment Automation Technology and Customer Focus.

An RPO vendor’s competency lies within its recruiter’s capabilities. In particular, customers should evaluate based on expertise and skills as well as competitive sourcing.

Much depends on the expertise and experience of the recruiters. Hence, companies should evaluate based on the resources a vendor invests in hiring, training and retaining the best recruiters in the industry. Regarding competitive sourcing, established vendors bring existing talent pools and also invest in talent pool creation for future hiring needs.

In addition to the talent pool, multiple resources such as job boards, industry associations and referrals are essential for a competitive sourcing strategy.

Web-based recruitment management software is essential for customers to not only gain deeper insight into the key performance metrics but also comply with the increasingly stringent regulations governing recruitment. There are some specific evaluation criteria.

Online Monitoring, a web-based recruitment management tool, can provide recruitment managers remote access to monitor progress at every level. Automated and custom report generation, known as key metrics, can give RPO customers insight to make strategic decisions.

Col laboration is essential because a web-interface tool will ensure easy collaboration and faster communication between recruiters, recruitment managers, hiring managers and interviewers.

Compliance must ensure RPO vendors understand and follow the record-keeping guidelines under EEO/AA regulations and maintain all profiles and communications related with an applicant in a central candidate repository. The quality of those hired depends largely on the selection process. Evaluate vendors based on the technical capability to deliver automated pre-screening and ranking.

Customer focus
Companies should evaluate vendors based on their customer focus. Some of the specific evaluation criteria are managerial support, client corporate image, and maximizing returns with flexible services. Regarding managerial support, it is very important that the vendor recruiters are trained and receive the right kind of support and supervision from their own supervisors. Ask a vendor how they manage their resources and the level of support they provide in solving difficult or urgent requisitions. A client’s corporate image is essential because the vendors believe in investing time to understand your corporate image and culture while professionally managing all candidates’ relations.

To maximize the RPO investment with flexible services, companies must plan ahead to enforce. Choose a vendor that believes in giving their clients greater value by supporting flexible service contracts such as managed services, one-off hiring and on-site recruitment support. believe in investing time to understand your corporate image and culture and manage all candidate relations with professionalism.

Pallavi Vanacharla is the Product Marketing Manager at SITI Corporation. She can be reached at pallavi@siti.com. SITI Corporation is a provider of Human Capital Supply Chain (HCSC) solutions.

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