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Recruitment process outsourcing

Lena Volk
Lena Volk November 14, 2020

A few months ago, we started studying a new service – RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing). And our team has already been working with one client according to this scheme for two months.

We have formed this service in accordance with our vision (“how it could be”) and it’s also based on the research of foreign companies. We also saw a description of this service from some Ukrainian agencies.

RPO is the full or partial outsourcing of the recruiting of another company. An outstaffing option is also possible. That is when the external recruiter is fully implemented into the internal recruiting team on a project basis (we have already had such clients as well).

Difference from standard, usual work of agencies:

1. Deeper involvement of the recruiter in the processes and culture of the client.

2. The base of candidates is maintained on the client's side, or we share the entire history of interaction at the end of our cooperation.

3. The recruiter is involved in the company's business processes and internal platforms (Slack, Trello, etc.). 

4. The recruiter can work on behalf of the client's brand.

5. The recruiter takes care of all communications with Hiring Managers, and it saves the time of the intermediary.

6. The recruiter acts as a Business Partner and can help build the recruiting process within the company.

7. Reducing financial costs when hiring a large number of people.

In the picture you can see in the form of infographics how we present it to clients.

Payment options:

  • fixed monthly payment (or hourly);
  • fixed monthly payment (hourly) + a small bonus for closed vacancies.

Now we prefer the second option.

Our hypotheses and what pains of the agency we would like to solve:

Hourly pay helps solve a number of problems:

- There are no cases when we worked for several months for free and did not close the vacancy. As a result, despite the fact that we save the budget for an individual client, the agency wins in income because all clients pay (this is especially true for agencies that work without prepayment).

- The client can change priorities and even can give us a different vacancy every week based on business needs (talking about the usual scheme, this is not OK  for us, as work starts from the very beginning again).

- Saving our time. When a client pays for this time, he gives feedbacks faster and keeps him/her informed of the process.

- The ability to increase the recruiter's rate in the agency and be competitive with IT companies.

Inclusion in the team and internal systems makes it possible to close vacancies better and faster.

- The recruiter communicates not only with the internal HR manager / Hiring manager, but also with everyone who is involved in the hiring process, so he/she understands a perfect portrait of the candidate even better.

- Our client invites recruiters to internal meetings, where the team finds out more about the company, development plans, internal processes, etc. It also helps to understand the portrait of the candidate and present the client much better.

-Understanding the process deeper, we can give our recommendations more correctly and influence this process.

Advantages of this approach for clients:

1. The first advantage (and for many the main one) is saving the budget of the hiring process, in case a large number of people are hired. We calculated that this scheme is beneficial for the client, provided that at least 10 people are hired per year. And if you consider that we have already hired 4 senior candidates for our client in the first 2 months, this benefit becomes many times higher.

2. The entire history and base of candidates is saved.

3. Saving time of the Hiring Manager or internal HR, who spends a lot of time transferring information. We get all the information directly and see it in internal systems.

4. The ability to control our workload: to give more vacancies or stop work when there are no open positions. And in this case, the client does not need to pay us, like to the internal recruiter, for example. The only thing included in the contract is a Notice Period. This term means time when we have to be informed about changes or end of cooperation.

Difficulties our team faced:

  • In the beginning, it was unusual to count how many hours you worked and put estimates by the hour (and meet them). But then we got used to it. Also, for the client, we briefly describe what we spent this time on.
  • Also, we had to get acquainted with some new systems. That was stressful and time-consuming too.
  • Control of loading from our side (for example, if it is necessary to take more vacancies, and the team is loaded). And now we discuss this with our clients and changing priorities. But in the future, we plan to keep the team not fully loaded with work.
  • Possible burnout of recruiters due to frequent client changes (because of the reasons listed above). We decided that we would take breaks and send them on a short vacation starting work with a new client.
  • The process has not yet been built, so we are adjusting it together with the client.

Conclusion: Now we see more advantages than disadvantages of this approach. We are going to try this style of work with several more clients and then decide what percentage of clients should be transferred to such a scheme.

But we definitely see the future in this kind of cooperation, and possibly other recruiting agencies and even outstaffing companies in Ukraine will start working according to this scheme soon too.

If you are interested in any details of this approach, write to me at ev@evotalents.com or Telegram: @elenavolk