Get More Agile with On-Demand RPO and Total Workforce

By Michael Hollister and Dean Lombardo

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Management Summary

RPO, meaning “recruitment process outsourcing,” occurs when an organization hires an external recruitment team to fully manage some or all of its recruitment functions for an extended period. When RPO is done piecemeal and periodically, or on an as-needed basis, we then call it on-demand RPO, project-based RPO, or project RPO.

This white paper discusses the characteristics, advantages and caveats of on demand RPO, and the technology underpinnings and customer-supportive processes that HR and HRIS leaders at RPO providers need in order to make RPO efficient and rewarding for themselves and their clients. With HR departments being leaned on to have a more strategic role in organizations, on-demand RPO represents a strategic practice to efficiently enhance recruitment efforts during peak growth periods and, conversely, to keep efforts contained in-house when internal resources and expertise are sufficient or make better business sense. With on-demand RPO, you’re not tied into a long-term oustourcing deal.

An Introduction to RPO and On-Demand RPO, Including RPO Challenges

As part of strategic HR transformation, HR departments are discovering it can be more efficient to outsource some talent acquisition functions as part of executive talent searches, temporary worker sourcing, or for help with filling full-time vacancies. Some organizations have moved beyond just executive talent searches and the hiring of temps to the practice of handing over the entire recruitment process (part-time and full-time) to managed service providers for what we call full talent acquisition/total workforce acquisition project management. Leveraging the recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) business model, talent acquisition can be shaped into more of an agile science via the right RPO provider.

Today’s HR professional must wear many hats to provide value to their organizations, beyond the somewhat insulting “HR police” and administrator monikers they’ve been labeled with in the past. The role of HR has grown beyond the traditional activities of policy development and application, employee performance management, hiring and firing, conflict resolution, absences, compensation and benefits, into becoming one of the drivers of strategic business transformation. With senior leaders tasking HR departments to lead this transformation through digitalization, analytics, reporting, and change management, the recruitment function is one of the most feasible roles to offload to experienced contractors. Recruitment can make up anywhere between 6.4 percent of an HR professional’s weekly time1, to as much as half of their time during growth periods, the latter according to some general purpose full-time HR pros we spoke with. The RPO model, whether employed long-term or on a shorter, as-needed basis can be the panacea that relieves the straw that broke the HR camel’s back. The process for landing the right talent has gotten longer during the past decade, despite numerous technological advancements, due to a number of factors including the shortage of new skills, the administration of more tests and assessments, and the sometimes paralyzing practice of hiring by committee.

Leveraging the recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) business model, talent acquisition can be shaped into more of an agile science via the right RPO provider.

RPO enables HR departments to concentrate on the aforementioned areas of human resources plus onboarding new people with existing culture, measuring and motivating the individuals in the workforce, and future strategic skill identification, specification and acquisition. It also empowers HR professionals to focus on fortifying their organization with business intelligence and data-funded ‘right hire’ metrics that drive execution on business objectives. As a collaborative step between RPO and employer, HR professionals can apply best-practice volume recruiting practices, intelligent candidate winnowing, and better, more objective assessment metrics, so that candidates and skills can be balanced against cultural and skill and competency fit.

So what’s the difference between traditional enterprise RPO and on-demand RPO? According to the RPO Association, traditional enterprise RPO service-level agreements are for two to three years typically. On-demand RPO agreements range from monthly, quarterly, semiannually to annually, but are usually 6 months in length.2

These on-demand RPO gigs are often deployed during bursty growth periods where existing HR staff cannot possibly handle the recruitment objective. Once again, with HR organizations being tasked to help to transform the business for future agility, RPO represents an important supplemental mechanism by which to flex to seasonal or peak-period talent demands. It’s not for everyone or everything, and, for this reason, many leading businesses are putting their proverbial toe in the water, testing the RPO model on projects and in regions where the upside outweighs the risk.

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In the next section, we discuss the strategic HR transformative advantages of on-demand RPO approaches, exploring scenarios where project RPO can be applied for greater overall return on investment as well as intangible HR transformation benefits. Part of strategic HR transformation is continuous business improvement, and agile and efficient recruitment is a key in acquiring new or fortified skills and personnel for your organization in its quest to evolve and innovate at pace or faster than the competition.

The Benefits of On-Demand RPO, and How to Mitigate Any Trade-Offs

A 2017 study by Aberdeen Research found that 79 percent of organizations today admit they have a skills gap. The same 79 percent admit that they lack a full understanding of how to resolve it. In other words, according to Aberdeen, more than three-quarters of organizations cannot even define top talent prior to designing a process to acquire it.3

Aberdeen also found that 87 percent of companies in the first half of 2017 were having trouble recruiting high potential talent according to their definition of high quality candidates, and 75 percent were unable to successfully build candidate pipelines. Despite these findings, an estimated 60 percent still handle recruitment internally. Part of this may be bandwidth-related, but may also be due to too much internalization and a failure to account for what candidates may be looking for in an employer.3

Enter RPO.

Engaging an experienced RPO provider can help to develop a more solid understanding of the needs of the workforce. Candidate needs can then be fused with the goals of the organization in the process of recruitment marketing, candidate engagement, hiring, skill acquisition and development, and more.

Using on-demand, or project, RPO services, organizations are not locked into long-term recruitment staff quagmires. Talent acquisition, even when done well, can be like finding a needle in a haystack, and if your HR professionals are going to be driving the business through skill and people acquisition, you want to occasionally liberate them from the time-consuming searching and distillation of the vast digital and physical talent universe for qualified candidates. Hence, HR leaders may wish to outsource a recruitment process for a specific hiring category, industry expertise, region or period of time to reduce the full-time HR staff burden. Additionally, multinational employers who may not have in-house expertise toward new business ventures and language and cultural realities can harness on-demand RPO services to ramp up quickly and effectively. Or maybe, the organization does have this skill in-house but just doesn’t have the human capacity to scale to meet demand. Partnerships with regional RPOs here can help to meet capacity and resource objectives as well.

Engaging an experienced RPO provider can help to develop a more solid understanding of the needs of the workforce. Candidate needs can then be fused

with the goals of the organization in the process of recruitment marketing, candidate engagement, hiring, skill acquisition and development, and more.

An RPO model allows employers to offload applicant tracking, administrative work and data integration. This empowers RPO users (i.e., HR professionals and hiring teams) to focus on the characteristics of top talent and matching those characteristics to internal metrics they have mapped to existing high performers, leading to skill optimization.

Which then leads to the next step: right fit and candidate and employee satisfaction. According to Aberdeen, only 19 percent of RPO users “are factoring in behavioral analytics in building a personality profile to fit the workplace culture.”3

RPO providers equipped with better information about candidate expectations enable their employment customers to restructure corporate environment to be more attractive. Here, we have to start talking about technology. RPOs have access to focused talent markets, talent information which they share with employers for access to top-quality professionals. The RPO provides greater reach and precision in the talent market, while the employer gets the data for retooling the internal culture and brand around guidance from the RPO provider. There has to be a recruitment platform for all of this that can distill prospective candidates into talent pools and prioritize them based on the employer’s predefined objectives.

With on-demand RPO services, organizations can get more efficient with recruitment spend than longer-term RPO can. If you have to grow talent and skills quickly to launch a new business unit or build a sales team in a new region, your in-house recruitment personnel don’t have to work twice as hard and long to get up to speed. Instead, you contract a go-to-market recruitment team that already has experience in landing talent within this skillset and region. You control the cost and can trial the outsourced recruitment project for a defined period of time, temporarily shutting off the investment with outsourced recruiters until the next time you need additional recruitment assistance.

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As an important side-note, some pundits might argue we’re not talking about business to consumer (B2C) principles here, but actually we are. Although on-demand RPO is a business-to-business (B2B) relationship in which one organization outsources its recruitment function for a period of time, the recruitment organization must ensure that the third party RPO enhances the consumer experience or, in this case, candidate experience. If you’re going to outsource a part of your talent acquisition relationship you better ensure the candidate experience is of the utmost quality during that period, so that qualified candidates are enticed rather than repulsed by your brand and your engagement attempts. You are transferring your recruitment processes over to a third party so you must vet that RPO provider, as you do with all managed service providers. Make sure you get proof of concept, trial and measure the result, and if satisfactory then you can employ RPO to recruit in other areas of the business; other countries; other languages.

To decide if on-demand RPO is right for you, take stock of:

öYour organizational need to meet seasonal or as-needed hiring peaks.

öThe need to get big recruitment projects “manned” when your full-time HR department is otherwise swamped.

öYour potential to proactively source more candidates while freeing up HR’s time.

öYour need to avoid the risk of hiring more recruiters than you need for a long-term period.

öYour organizational ability or, conversely, your lack of the internal expertise to hire for new markets and regions the business wants to enter.

öHow an RPO provider might help you to rapidly meet your recruiting challenges for a new business venture or in a foreign region, when time, internal resources and experience are short.

öYour desire to reduce fixed costs. Hourly wages are something you can control. On-demand RPO can be applied when needed to cost-effectively complement your existing in-house staffing and skill-sourcing activities.

öYour ability to more accurately forecast recruitment budgets. With greater cost control comes greater cost predictability, and more-precise longer-term planning.

ö If an RPO provider, and the technology platforms it uses, can fortify your organization with the intelligent data to improve talent sourcing efficacy, time to hire (TTH), quality of hire and other talent acquisition metrics.

Your selection criteria must encompass not only the healthy overlap between an RPO provider’s experience with your business development areas but also an intelligent technology foundation that makes it easier for you as the employer to ultimately meet, engage, attract, and hire the best possible talent.

A last important decision criterion should be whether the RPO and technology vendor can provide flexible branding for multi-brand RPO service success. Let’s say your organization is an international consumer product manufacturer and retailer, and you need language and regional law compliance support where you want to hire sales and establish authentic operational presence across your multiple brands. The RPO, through its own experience, resources and technology partnerships, should be able to assist you in meeting your growth initiatives.

Lumesse Support for On-Demand RPO and Total Workforce Acquisition

The demand for new skills can impact us quickly. With the right RPO partner, an HR organization can gain immediate access to a large talent pool, one that has already to some degree been assessed and vetted. This can contribute to faster time to hire (TTH), total workforce acquisition, skills transfer and improved quality of hire.

Ask your RPO about total talent acquisition/total workforce acquisition, a discipline in which it puts good consultants on site for projects but also lands

your organization top professionals for full-time careers and contribution.

Wearing many hats including increasingly strategic ones, HR staffers can’t always be hiring full-tilt. They need technological and specialized human assistance for peak periods in which partnering talent acquisition processes with RPO providers makes good business sense. Look for an RPO provider with a proven record of hiring experts in a given field and with a flexible talent acquisition technology platform that supports multiple regions and languages.

Ask your RPO about total talent acquisition/total workforce acquisition, a discipline in which it puts good consultants on site for projects but also lands your organization top professionals for full-time careers and contribution. The RPO partner should be able to deliver strategic benefits over time by gradually gaining a better understanding of your culture and how to help you to measure and improve quality of hire. Lumesse provides a smart and scalable technology underpinning that equips RPO providers with the tools to help them to scale to your different organizational and business unit needs, and to the multilingual and multicultural and disparate legal requirements you want to address.

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With more than 20 years of experience serving the world’s talent management requirements, Lumesse offers a flexible talent acquisition technology platform that empowers RPOs to efficiently flex and scale their operations to meet talent growth periods across different dimensions such as new industry, new country, new region, and new business paradigm and process needs.

The Lumesse TalentLink talent acquisition platform is multiclient and multi-brand. With a secure open API technology platform, it is flexible and simple to use, leveraging the spirit of today’s easy consumer and social application interfaces. It supports talent acquisition from sourcing through onboarding through bundles/modules such as best-of-breed candidate engagement, talent sourcing, job distribution, video assessment, reference checking, employee onboarding, and recruitment insights.

Lumesse TalentLink provides recruitment professionals and hiring teams with the ability to evaluate freelancers and FTEs side-by-side as part of total workforce acquisition. Here are some of the things RPO providers can accomplish with Lumesse TalentLink as their technology partner:

öGet implemented, integrated and hiring quickly to address customer needs. On-demand RPO means less implementation time, and Lumesse SaaS offerings are based on an open API platform that grow your RPO talent acquisition network rapidly and effectively.

öDetermine best fit through 360-degree candidate references, including customers, and via thorough background checks and other assessment processes.

ö Identify which talent sourcing networks are delivering the right hires. Knowledge of ideal engagement channels is critical toward shrewd investment levels and finding the most-qualified talent. TalentLink also empowers recruiters to save time and reduce manual data entry via its easy UI and job distribution and career site relationships. Recruiters can post a job once and distribute rather than having to post the job to each individual website.

öCreate high profile attraction campaigns. In a world where recruiters are going to need to recruit with the same social and digital reach as marketers, Lumesse offers the multinational experience and flexible, multibrand, multilingual technology to create the hiring campaigns that land the right talent when and where you need it. Maybe you want to see the candidate before you make, or lead the employer toward, a decision. Lumesse TalentLink supports video resumes, video interviews, and video assessments.

öGrow and optimize talent pipelines to meet today’s and tomorrow’s needs. Lumesse offers the professional networking, job distribution, and relevant content support and expertise to engage active and passive candidates, nurture them, and welcome them to the brands and teams you support.

öTrack everything in an easy software platform, so your expanded talent pipeline doesn’t overwhelm you. RPO recruiters always know where the employer and its candidates stand in the recruitment process, with the capability to continually stay in touch with engaged candidates as well as share easy reports to employment customers. 4

öDerive the full benefits of total talent acquisition (i.e., freelance and open FTEs.) Build a pipeline of skills you can engage and employ for longer-term objectives and with which employers can infuse their existing staff with new skills. Get teams working together efficiently for critical skills transfer to your RPO organization as well as your employment customers.

öFill your consultant, part-time and full-time hiring needs faster, through volume methods but in a talent acquisition system that equips you with the easy tools and intelligence to sort, identify and welcome the talent, experience and skills your client organizations need.

öEnhance quality of hire through a mix of your extensive RPO industry and geographical experience and a leading multinational talent acquisition platform that can easily flex to RPO providers’ and their customers’ needs.

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Conclusion

The on-demand RPO model enables employers and RPOs to ramp up on talent when they need, or to hold the line when business factors demand. Maybe as an employer you’re not ready to “dive” into RPO fully. The concept of on-demand RPO invites us to test the waters on a project-by-project basis without wholesale organizational investment in sourcing and recruitment for unfamiliar talent markets.5

Project RPO is ideal fit for companies that want to try recruitment outsourcing before scaling across the enterprise and across regions. Consider it for peak-season sourcing, or in courting

new industries or geographies where recruitment expertise or resources are lacking.

RPO offers greater agility, a team ready to swing toward and deliver on a skills requirement for you. Got to launch a new product, want to expand into a new market or start a new division? Want to attract the right talent fast? Use on-demand RPO and project RPO services to ramp up efficiently for fluctuating skill and hiring requirements. Try it out by having a small part of the business outsource its recruitment. Then, if you like the results, you can scale the solution further across the organization with an RPO partner that employs a flexible and easy to use multinational talent acquisition platform.

Project RPO is ideal fit for companies that want to try recruitment outsourcing before scaling across the enterprise and across regions. Consider it for peak-season sourcing, or in courting new industries or geographies where recruitment expertise or resources are lacking.

Before scaling your RPO usage, measure results such as:

öReduced time to hire (TTH). How quickly was your company able to respond to a hiring need?

öThe infusion of intelligent data to improve the quality of hire and transfer skills to in-house personnel. Did you acquire some of the skills the organization needed through contractor knowledge sharing? Can you measure contribution and performance of the new contractor or hire and value offered to the assembled team?

öWhich of the RPO’s talent sourcing networks are delivering the right hires and which ones should you leverage in your in-house recruitment efforts.

öYour ability to easily apply project RPO in other regions and across brands.

öThe impact of RPO use on brand and engagement levels versus the cost of hiring or using full-time recruiters for just the limited project period. Are the trade-offs too risky?

öWhether hourly wages that you control are less costly than forcing existing staff to perform double-duty. Employ RPO strategically to complement your existing staff and skill requirements.

öWhether you are more agile through RPO. Can you efficiently deploy resources on an as-needed basis, with faster implementation, so that your in-house HR professionals can lead the organization in navigating market changes and disruptions that impact talent and performance.

If you’re going to outsource, it should be with an RPO partner using a platform that handles all aspects of talent acquisition — sourcing, recruiting, hiring, total workforce acquisition/total talent acquisition. It’s not about replacing your full-time HR department. It’s about making them smarter, more agile, and more strategic in helping to lead and grow the business.

Last, although recruitment is outsourced in on-demand RPO, it is critical to keep hiring managers in the loop. The recruit’s collaboration with future managers and collaborators needs to start at a pilot level as well, so collaboration in the tool is a must. Project outsourcing doesn’t have to mean a third party somewhere is handling everything. The input of the recruit’s future team members must also be taken into consideration, and Lumesse TalentLink supports this collaboration through easy process configuration, collaborative tools, and email notification integration.

Lumesse provides Talent Solutions to more than 1,500 organizations in over 70 countries enabling them to engage and nurture the best talent in an ever-changing and demanding global environment.

For further information visit: www.lumesse.com

© Lumesse AS All rights reserved. Unless explicitly permitted by Lumesse AS or by applicable copyright law, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise.

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References1 Business.com: “It’s Not All Paperwork: How Does HR Really Spend Their Time?” by Ian Burke, Feb. 2017, https://www.business.com/articles/its-not-all-paperwork-how-does-hr-really-spend-their-time

2 Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association – The RPO Voice: “Types of RPO Engagements: Short-Term Project RPO (Part 2 of 5),” by Allison Reilly, Sept. 2013, https://blog.rpoassociation.org/blog/bid/314623/types-of-rpo-engagements-short-term-project-rpo-part-2-of-5

3 Aberdeen: Recruitment Process Outsourcing: A Lifeline in the War for Top Talent,” by Zachary Chertok, Aug. 2017, http://www.aberdeen.com/research/16636/16636-rr-recruitment-outsource-ally/content.aspx

4 Hays Talent Solutions: “Intelligent Resourcing. How to Improve Your Recruitment Process,” Sept. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ7JjA9LaFs

5 Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association – The RPO Voice: “New Trend in Recruiting: Project RPO,” by Carrie Kolar, Oct. 2015, https://blog.rpoassociation.org/blog/new-trend-in-recruiting-project-rpo

About Lumesse

Lumesse provides talent acquisition and management solutions to approximately 1,500 organizations in over 70 countries, enabling them to engage and nurture the best talent in an ever-changing and demanding global environment. With our unique and highly adaptable solutions, our customers are well prepared to capitalize on the fast evolution of new technologies and disruptive business conditions, while meeting all business needs locally and globally.

For more information visit lumesse.com.