Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), in which a company outsources parts or all of its recruitment activities, has been growing rapidly in recent years. Intelligence Group, in collaboration with ToTalent and Djaja Ottenhof, has conducted research on the RPO industry in Europe.
RPO
The growth was in particular the growth in recruitment automation and complexity in processes resulted in companies increasingly using RPOs as part of their recruitment strategy. In addition, a new generation of recruitment KPIs is on the way, such as hiring budget, hiring velocity and net hiring score. This new set of KPIs is evidently causing the demand for RPO services to rise.
Increase the value of an organization
Apart from all the general developments in the market, the corona crisis, as we know, has also had a huge impact on the labor market. Forbes talks about a large-scale hiring initiative for companies in the United States in the coming months. Now that the end of the pandemic is hopefully in sight, unemployment rates in the United States are falling at a rapid pace and the labor market is preparing for the “great rehire”. It has probably not escaped anyone’s attention that the unemployment figures in the Netherlands and Europe are not lagging behind either and are heading back towards the pre-corona level. This indicates that Dutch companies also have to get ready for the post-corona labor market situation. RPO’s could therefore grow even faster than ever in the coming months or years since using RPO services is an effective way to increase the value of an organization in terms of recruitment. Forbes lists five ways to do this:
- Scalability: most RPO services can be scaled up or down depending on the needs;
- Adaptability: the recruitment process is often customized to the specific requirements;
- Cost-effectiveness: companies that choose RPO as part of their recruitment strategy benefit through a decrease in costs;
- Technology: RPOs often possess advanced recruitment technology, such as AI-based recruitment platforms that small-scale companies often do not;
- Support: naturally, RPO can also provide support to the Talent Acquisition team, for instance, by taking certain tasks away from them;
Recruiting technology
Intelligence Group asked among others Jeremy Tipper, Founder at 2HC, to share his view on the industry. Automation is the megatrend touching all sectors of the economy, but especially in talent acquisition technology is rapidly changing the face of the industry. RPOs are particularly aggressive in adopting and embracing technology, says Jeremy Tipper. “There is amazing technology out there for outsourcing and matching these days. For example, there is quite a lot of chatter in the industry about a sort of recruiterless recruiting. I think that you’ll get to a point where certain aspects of the workforce rarely interact with a recruiter and the vast majority of the interaction is done through automated processes.”
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