DOING MORE WITH LESS – FUTURE OF RECRUITMENT WITHOUT A RECRUITMENT CONSULTANT?

Just like everybody else, recruitment consultants and HR professionals have to do more work with fewer resources, employers expect employees to continually reinvent themselves whilst organisations are looking for ways to reduce costs.

All aspects of business processes are being reviewed. Is it better to let specialists do this and focus our resources on something more strategic, is a question being asked more frequently in Australian boardrooms.

This environment has placed a new focus on recruitment services and Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) specifically. The Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association defines RPO as:

When a provider acts as a company’s internal recruitment function for a portion or all of its jobs. RPO providers manage the entire recruiting/hiring process from job profiling through the onboarding of the new hire, including staff, technology, method and reporting. A properly managed RPO will improve a company’s time to hire, increase the quality of the candidate pool, provide verifiable metrics, reduce cost and improve governmental compliance.

Companies are realising that a fixed in-house recruiting model is expensive and is difficult to scale up and down quickly in response to the market conditions. RPO provides considerable savings compared to working with traditional recruitment consultants, where the RPO partner is focused on achieving the client’s business goals, not just making a “one off sale”.

Affordability and Scalability

RPO is about decreasing time and cost, whilst improving quality but it can also deliver strategic benefits such as:

1. Filling hard to fill positions:

Recruitment Consultants who also deliver RPO services are able to leverage the network, time, and resources of an outside recruiter, one with expertise in finding experts for tough to fill positions.

2. Focus on more strategic issues:

An RPO provider frees up HR time previously taken up by the recruitment services functions and allows them to focus on strategic issues of employee engagement and retention.

3. Accountability:

Organizations are now seeing that recruitment is about developing a talent pipeline that requires a continuous improvement process. Process in turn needs method, and method brings about accountability. RPO enables organisations to leverage best practices across industries, a perspective that can only be seen from outside the firm by an experienced recruitment consultant.

In Australia RPO is becoming increasingly flexible as client’s needs can change in a moment’s notice. More companies are using the RPO recruitment services for permanent placements and temporary labour demands and Flexi Personnel has witnessed this trend here in Melbourne

CEO of Flexi Personnel Wayne Fleming

Flexi Personnel RPO recruitment services can be engaged in whatever way works best for the client. For some, outsourcing the entire hiring process is the optimal solution, for others, the hiring process maybe shared with their internal HR team. We can react and scale rapidly as your needs for recruitment services changes without adding fixed costs to your business and improving your bottom line.

The role of a professional recruitment consultant is fast becoming more strategic and critical to the success of every organisation. It’s high time that “people are our most important asset” becomes a way in business rather than a throwaway line around the boardroom table and in publicity releases.