3 Pros and 2 Cons of Hiring an RPO

Written by Josephyne King

 

RPO, or Recruitment Process Outsourcing, is expected to grow 21% in Asia over the next 4 years. The sudden expansion of the market may have you questioning whether hiring an RPO firm is the right decision. Generally, that answer will change company to company. In order to decide, you first need to weigh the pros and cons of an RPO.

However, before we get into the pros and cons, what is an RPO?

An RPO is an agency or firm that specialized in recruitment services. This includes recruitment, streamlining your current hiring system, and helping interview clients. Some companies will choose to completely outsource everything to an RPO firm, while other companies will use an RPO to support their current HR department. So why would you want to hire an RPO?

 

PROS

Resources

Because an RPO is specialized in recruiting, it will most likely have the best resources available to do the job. This can be a big database of candidates, to the newest recruiting tech. Even if a company is a large, multi-branched corporation, it may not want to spend so much effort and money up front in order to get the best recruiting resources. An RPO, since it depends on recruitment, will.

 

Expertise

This one works hand-in-hand with the last point. RPO professionals live and breath recruitment. Contrary to an internal HR department, recruiting is all RPOs do, so they have a laser focus on the industry. RPO professionals simply spend more time within the industry and have learned and practiced more recruitment than a general employee within a corporation.

 

View Point

This one may be a toss-up depending on your needs, but generally, RPOs have a better viewpoint of a situation. Since RPO s are from outside of a company, they enter a situation without bias that of a company, but it’s harder to make an internal employee shed pre-conceived notions about procedures or candidates.

 

CONS

Control

As with any outsourcing of tasks, your control of the process or employee is limited. Instead of being able to walk down the hall to talk to your coworker in recruitment and talk about any problems, an RPO is outside of the organization. You can make requests of RPO professionals, but your ability to oversee what they do and how they do it is limited to phone calls and emails.

 

Trust

This will change the longer you work with an RPO, but when you first hire a firm, it can be hard to fully trust them right off the bat. Trust is built and is easier to have when the person you need is a few steps away, not a drive across town.

 

Other Considerations

Beyond the things listed above, there are some factors that don’t clearly fall in the Pros or Cons, but instead depend on a set of factors that an online article can’t fully tell you.

 

Your Needs

There are some things that can only be solved by an RPO, like bringing in a pair of experts to optimize your current recruitment services. There are other things that could be solved by hiring an internal employee. You need to first find out what you need, and what you want, and then find out which options best answer them before you can consider the other pros and cons.

 

Your Current Recruitment Team

This can be anything from a non-existent hiring staff to a fully fledged HR department that does everything from recruiting to handling internal dispute. Once you know your needs, you need to consider how your internal team will work with your decision. Would training a new employee help with the workload or add to it? Would hiring an RPO lead to too much discord, or would it help relieve a heavy workload?

 

Cost

Depending on your needs, this can vary a lot. Generally, there are two kinds of pricing structures at RPOs depending on the services. If you just need help recruiting candidates for interviews, you will most likely only pay if the candidate you hire was referred by the RPO. Usually, it’s a percentage of the hired candidate’s first year salary. For other services, there may be a monthly or annual fee that varies in amount. If you think your problem could be solved by just hiring a new employee, you also need to consider the expected salary of the new hire.

Whether you’re a startup, a foreign company opening a Japanese branch or a longstanding, local corporation, expanding your business can be important. Recruitment, whether in-house or in an RPO, can be paramount for the future of your company. Weigh the factors well, and make sure that you have the best resources necessary to find the best people for your company.