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Beware the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Tricksters

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Beware the RPO Tricksters

The UK Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) market is booming. More and more companies are outsourcing core functions as they see the cost and quality benefits that specialist providers can deliver, and recruitment is well on its way to becoming one of the most outsourced processes. Recruitment process outsourcing has been proven to reduce costs, speed up time to hire, improve the quality of candidates, lessen reliance on agencies and leads to streamlined operations. We take no small measure of pride in this, having been at the forefront of the market for many years.

But as the number of companies seeking the benefits of recruitment process outsourcing grows, so too do the number of businesses claiming to be able to provide the service. It’s an age-old story; with an increase in demand comes an increase in supply – but not all of this supply is good, or trustworthy, as some look to quickly capitalise on the boom.

We’ve noticed a steady increase in the number of recruitment agencies, pressured by cannibalised margins and fierce competition, desperately trying to protect themselves and up profits by reinventing themselves as RPO specialists. Not only is this misleading, with agencies often having absolutely no experience in process outsourcing, in some cases it’s downright underhand. Some have taken to simply plugging in some adverts under a client’s brand before simply using these to filter their own candidates through.

As the UK’s leading pure-play, independent recruitment process outsourcer, we firmly believe in having no preferred agency partners, as this approach doesn’t deliver the best selection of talent for clients. But even those established RPOs affiliated with agencies would no doubt balk at such practices.

The RPO market shows no signs of slowing down, but oddly we don’t anticipate that more and more agencies will look to rebrand themselves as recruitment process outsources. This is because the market has evolved over the last decade, with trusted RPOs moulding a sophisticated, bespoke service to clients tailored to their requirements. While some companies may choose to market themselves, this is not something which can be emulated overnight, and we feel that those that do, while making outlandish, undeliverable promises to clients, will quickly be found out and fail.

Our advice? When identifying and selecting an recruitment process outsourcer, do plenty of research. As always, the best evidence of work comes through client testimonials, so be sure to select a company who has proven that they can be trusted to provide a high level of service with tangible results, time and again.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about RPO, visit our FAQ page, or you can always give us a call.

A Recruitment Strategy Bound for Success

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A Recruitment Strategy Bound for Success

The UK is suffering a talent shortage across many industries; it’s probably a hurdle you struggle with on a daily basis. Not only is it extremely difficult to find the right candidate, but, once you do, it often takes a great deal of time and effort to persuade that person to take the job. The skill involved with both these tricky phases of recruitment increasingly calls for an element of marketing nous, with many commentators recently arguing the line between this and elements of recruitment is becoming blurred. With this conversation set to continue, we at Omni have started thinking about what the development could mean in terms of recruitment strategy. Can marketing rules apply to this essential task? In particular, how do we need to define between a sourcing strategy and attraction strategy?

Sourcing strategy is obviously a key part of any organisation’s recruitment strategy and can be likened to traditional ‘outbound’ sales and marketing. Typically, this will involve sending out the company’s message in a very direct way, initiating a conversation with your audience in the hope that they will be compelled to take a buying action. With easily identifiable metrics, an immediate response and a clear return on investment, many organisations rely on these kind of activities alone. For recruiters, these this could mean posting vacancies on their careers website, in the press, or make direct approaches to active and passive candidates with specific vacancies. You might also consider using agencies or headhunters to run a vacancy campaign on your behalf, or perhaps initiate employee referral programmes to generate candidates for existing vacancies within the business. It’s short-term, focussed on individual candidates or vacancies, and designed to generate immediate results. More importantly, it’s a skill-set recruiters are 100% familiar with.

But your recruitment strategy requires another facet if it is to succeed; an attraction strategy that pulls people towards your company.  A solid attraction strategy should make people want to work for your business before they are even aware of a vacancy. This sounds like a difficult achievement, but it all begins by developing a compelling employer brand story. Once in place, you will need to generate additional content that supports and projects your brand values to the marketplace. These are not skills possessed by the vast majority of recruiters, and yet are increasingly critical in securing the talent of tomorrow. These ‘inbound’ marketing techniques, referring to the term coined by US marketing software firm Hubspot, centre on the creation of content that is useful to your target audience, such as blog posts, guides or White Papers, that can be found easily by both job seekers and non-job seekers within your target communities or industry sector.  This becomes part of a much longer-term plan that begins to nurture talent in the sector, exposing it to your key brand and EVP messages and subtly positioning the business as a desirable place to work. Attraction strategies clearly have a less obvious or immediate return on investment, but, if done effectively, will underpin and support your sourcing activities and dramatically improve metrics in this field over time. There are many challenges involved with developing this element of your recruitment strategy, not least being to identify who in the business should be responsible.

The truth is, a combination of the best of both approaches is the basis for the most solid recruitment strategy. Indeed, if your ‘inbound’ techniques succeed, what started as a means of attraction may well become part of your sourcing strategy. The challenge for businesses is to identify the resource best suited to each activity and create a framework that ensures all approaches are moving in the same positive direction. To share your thoughts on other elements that make for the best recruitment strategy, be part of our cross-industry research into the matter by joining our Strategic Recruitment Forum on LinkedIn and taking the survey now.

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