Recruitment process outsourcing in Nigeria – A must-read for all HR professionals
Hiring the right people and managing them can take a company to unprecedented heights. However, finding and attracting talented individuals with the right blend of skills, experience, dedication, and creativity has never been more challenging.
In Nigeria, specifically, thanks to the alarming increase in the number of ‘professional job seekers’— pseudo-talents whose only actual competence is excelling at interviews and getting the job— finding top talent have become even more complex than ever.
Professional job seekers are highly proficient in hacking the interview process. They interview exceptionally well, know all the right things to say, present impressive information about the organisation and blow the interviewer away.
Unfortunately, after hiring them, organisations and their HR professionals only realise that they have been conned after months and months of paying wages for chronic underperformance.
Sadly, because of the deficiencies in their in-house recruitment system, most organisations lack immunity against professional job seekers. The cost of this susceptibility always proves too high for these organisations and their HR professionals.
Fortunately, the challenge of finding top talent and detecting pseudo-talents is one that highly experienced RPO providers have resolved and mastered.
For instance, in responding to the threat of professional job seekers, Workforce Africa devotes an entire business unit to creating custom-tailored assessment instruments that screen for hard-to-test capabilities in job candidates.
The result is the creation of a recruitment system that has made it possible to quickly spot top talent and detect fake talent consistently and with a low margin of error.
Therefore, when businesses of all sizes have high-volume hiring needs, recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) becomes the logical choice for ensuring that they get high-quality candidates in large numbers.
The rest of this guide provides information on:
- The definition of RPO
- How an RPO benefits organisations
- Whether an RPO is a good fit for your organisation
- How to choose an RPO provider
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Understanding Recruitment Process Outsourcing
Recruitment process outsourcing is a talent acquisition strategy in which an organisation outsources some part or all of its recruitment processes to an external agency specialising in securing talent.
As a hiring model, it is scalable and very flexible. In addition, it is more cost-effective than having an in-house recruiting team because you can customise your service depth with an RPO provider based on your available resources and needs.
When you sign up with an RPO, your provider becomes an extension of your company’s HR department, and there are several advantages that this arrangement affords businesses.
4 Core Benefits of Recruitment Process Outsourcing
An experienced and highly skilled RPO provider can offer your organisation the following benefits:
Quality Candidates in the Shortest Possible Time
Providing top talent at the shortest possible time is the most substantial benefit that good RPOs offer organisations.
RPOs can accomplish this often because they have an ever-growing talent pipeline, well-established networks and highly efficient candidate assessment systems in place.
These infrastructural advantages enable RPO to help companies find better quality candidates than they could find independently.
Reduced Cost to Hire
There are several hidden costs in recruitment that RPOs have the potential to shield organisations from.
In the short term, when you make your initial investment into RPO services, your company will be spared the high overhead costs of implementing new recruitment methodologies or technologies in-house.
In the long term, your business will also experience the cost reduction that comes with strategic recruitment processes due to:
- Higher quality of candidates
- Better retention
- Professional hiring practices that translate to positive employer branding
Very importantly, considering how time-consuming recruitment can be, working with an RPO will take the burden off your internal team and free up their time to focus on other core business tasks.
Flexibility
Considering that most organisations have fluctuating hiring demands, using an RPO rather than investing in a full-time recruiting team allows your business to scale up or down your hiring support as needed.
Strategic Support
It’s well-known that the ability to recruit and retain high-calibre and well-motivated staff is the main differentiator of successful organisations. However, the reality is good candidates always have a choice because there’s always competition for them.
Therefore, having a skilled RPO that positions your business to attract top talent gives your business a significant edge. Moreover, if your company is working to execute specific strategic plans, an RPO can help you align your hiring with those goals without delays.
Is Recruitment Process Outsourcing Right for You?
As valuable as RPO services are, it’s not always suitable for every business. There are a few things you should consider when evaluating an RPO solution for your company.
The first factor is to carefully consider why your company needs recruiting help. It would help if you began by exploring the key reasons and then ranked them by priority.
For instance, an RPO might be best for your business if:
- Your internal team are over-taxed.
- You anticipate an increase in hiring activity.
- Your management team wants a more predictable and reliable option than traditional internal recruiters, contract recruiters or agencies.
- You want to improve the way you track hiring metrics like recruiting quality, speed and cost.
The second is to consider the level of assistance you require.
RPO firms typically provide two levels of service:
- Project outsourcing
- Total outsourcing
When your organisation needs help with hiring a few engineers, it’s called project outsourcing. Or, if your organisation has a new contract and needs 500 frontline staff immediately, that’s also project outsourcing.
On the other hand, if your entire HR department needs support, that’s usually classified as total outsourcing.
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Selecting an RPO Provider
Investing the time to choose an RPO provider will always be worth the investment in the end.
When you choose the right recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) partner, it can give your organisation access to cutting-edge technology, assessment tools and a healthy pipeline of skilled candidates.
Below are a few things to consider when choosing an RPO provider.
1. Structure of Service
Recruitment process outsourcing providers vary significantly in the processes, technologies, and talent they deploy.
While some RPOs may offer to refine your current processes and work with your existing infrastructure and staff, others prefer to implement a complete end-to-end solution.
To get clarity, take the time to ask questions and explain your expectation. It is also crucial to evaluate service agreements closely to determine which provider will best meet your needs.
2. Company Background Check
The best way to ascertain any RPO firm’s professionalism, competency, and reliability is to conduct a thorough background check on the firm.
Get a list of the RPO’s clients (preferably from sources other than the RPO) and have detailed conversations with them about the quality of service they received from the RPO. This background check will save your organisation a lot of trouble.
3. Level of Compatibility
There’s nothing quite as frustrating as working with incompatible teammates.
Therefore, it’s essential to select an RPO provider based on the compatibility between your staff and theirs. This is very important considering that the RPO will serve as an extension of your internal HR team.
Shared values, trust, compatible leadership styles and mutual respect are critical to a successful long-term relationship.
In summing up:
Nothing is quite as crucial to the success of an organisation as finding the right talent at the right time and at the right price.
Though many companies hesitate at the idea of outsourcing, the right RPO provider can give your business an advantage over the competition.
For as long as the success of any organisation depends upon the quality of the people they can attract, recruit and retain, getting the services of a skilled RPO to help you find people who are an excellent fit for your organisation is the single best gift you can give your business.