Problem: Time and resource taken from the employee focus of HR

As part of RTM’s problem-solving approach to recruitment, we spoke with Director of Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), Nicola Dunne, on how trying to manage the entire employee lifecycle in HR can lead to neglect in other key business areas.

In a nutshell, what does a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) solution solve?

A business's problem can be pretty varied and specific to their goals, but from a big picture perspective, when it comes to recruitment problem-solving we're usually looking to address 3 key areas:

• Cost

• Quality of hire

• Business impact

Breaking that down a little bit further we can go into various tangents, but if you think about large clients their concern will typically be dealing with huge volume, so, "how do we hire in the most efficient way that's not particularly costly." Another common issue we see working with brands who have huge variability in their forecasting process, is that they often don't have a workforce plan for their business, so the scalability element is critical to help them with that.

Put simply, we come in and take ownership of all the hiring and recruitment issues a business has, and by solving them – we’re expediting their growth.

How can you support HR teams drowning in responsibilities?

Recruitment in its purest form is very admin intensive as it's transactional by nature, so it needs a lot of people power.

When you think about the variety of different lenses within a business, an HR team are usually looking through an experience lens, where they're focussed on what's happening from an employee perspective and so recruitment processes can distract from other business priorities. Often, people teams end up saying "get this out of the HR department!" so, in those cases, we can step in, and own that workload, thus enabling the HR team to focus on D&I initiatives, Leadership Development and other bigger, important projects that may not be getting enough attention and resource.

Do different teams within HR want different things from an outsourcing service?

From the lens of a Hiring Manager, their goals are clear "I need the best people in the market, I need them quick, and I needed them yesterday", whereas from a Procurement Manager lens, efficiency of processes may not be priority to them, as their concerns lie more around the price tag, so “what is our total cost of hiring annually and what's the best value for money”.

When we're looking at how we can support an organisation, we try to engage early on with as many people across the business as possible, as well as the key decision-makers, as we're ultimately trying to tick everyone's boxes. The people who we speak to across each department will have a different angle of what they're trying to achieve - so alignment is key.

‍

What risk do businesses run by not investing in RPO?

In my experience, if businesses don't invest in an outsourcing solution for their recruitment, they’ll continue to dilute and devalue the HR proposition. It will pull valuable time and resource from the work the HR teams are trying to achieve daily.

If businesses don't invest, they won't realise the baseline cost efficiencies, effective recruitment process and true business impact. In other words, having the right people, at the right time and terms – 3 things which are business critical for growth.