What Recruitment Outsourcing Solution Should I Choose?

Suppose you’re persuaded of the benefits of a recruitment outsourcing solution. You’re excited by the possibility of better candidates, powered-up analytics, and improved time-to-hire — with substantial cost benefits as you ramp up your workforce.

Now the question becomes: which solution should you choose? Here’s a summary of five popular models, plus the key advantages they bring to organisations looking for scalability, flexibility, and speed.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)

RPO involves an employer outsourcing its permanent hiring function to an external partner. The RPO provider can take responsibility for all aspects of a recruitment process and manage relationships with hiring managers, internal talent, external candidates and third-party agencies to deliver on your organisation’s recruitment needs.

An RPO solution can be tailored to any situation. You might choose full outsourcing of all your hiring, supplement an existing in-house team with a carve-out of a specific skill set or even enhance a specific process such as candidate sourcing and screening. Whatever the scenario, your provider will carefully integrate your company values with best-in-class process management.

Critical advantages of RPOs include:

Enhanced candidate and hiring manager experience
Reduction in time-to-hire
Improved candidate quality
Technological innovation
Standardisation of process and governance

Project on-demand

Also known as “pop-up RPO or RPO on demand”, this is a recruitment project with defined volumes and timeframes. The RPO provider integrates with an existing HR or talent acquisition function for a limited period, bringing additional resources to bear at times of high demand.

Project on-demand is popular with organisations looking for fast and reliable delivery of business-critical projects, such as opening a new shared services centre or relocating offices. A key advantage is the fast deployment of people and technology to execute a project under intense time pressure.

Managed Services Programme (MSP)

Like an RPO, an MSP is an end-to-end recruitment solution. Unlike an RPO, it focuses on contingent workers rather than permanent ones. (The term “contingent” covers temporary workers, contractors, freelancers, gig workers, Statement of Works, and other non-permanent staff.)

Here are some of the core advantages of an MSP:

Reduction of risk on the client side due to the provider’s legal expertise and knowledge of temporary labour regulations across global markets
Control of a hiring process that often has less rigour around it than permanent recruitment
Visibility of headcount and temporary labour spend
Improved speed-to-market and onboarding
Simplification of payrolling and invoicing, which is handled by a single supplier

Total Talent Acquisition (TTA)

As the name implies, TTA rolls up permanent and contingent hiring into a single programme with a single recruitment outsourcing provider. It’s a notably streamlined and cost-effective solution, creating a single recruitment ecosystem. Hiring managers deal with one supplier for all their needs.

Additional benefits of total talent acquisition include:

A consistent talent marketing approach for all hiring types
Economies of scale not realised through a standalone RPO or MSP solution
Improved route to market in converting temporary resources into permanent employees
Ability to react quickly to changes in the candidate market by simply shifting focus within an established team

Staff Augmentation

Staff augmentation is an organisational strategy that allows in-house HR and talent acquisition teams with a short-term need to quickly increase their capacity and resources. In this model, a provider deploys high-quality recruitment professionals to the client, typically to cover short-term busy periods or alleviate the strain on the in-house team.

We can help you decide!

Above all, Page Outsourcing solutions are flexible and tailored to your unique needs. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. If none of the models listed above meet your requirements, we will design one that does.