How to Select, Manage & Implement an RPO

Transcription

1 Top 10 Tips: RPO How to Select, Manage & Implement an RPO We show you how a good RPO will go above and beyond the label - and how to find the right one for your company. Stakeholders RPO shouldn t be just a procurement initiative. It shouldn t just be an HR initiative. If you are going to change the recruitment of talent into your organisation so fundamentally, then you need to get a wide community involved from selection through to implementation. Use your existing workforce data to point out to key stakeholders where the opportunities are for an RPO provider to enhance the quality of recruitment process, the quality of hires, and reduce turnover of staff. Who to include: HR - Recruitment process and quality of talent. Procurement - Cost savings. Recruiting managers - Time savings, enhanced quality of hire and tenure. Finance - Cost savings Marketing - Enhanced brand experience IT - Enhanced technical capability with easy interfaces Senior management - Most of the above! A good RPO provider will be able to demonstrate experience of engaging with stakeholders at all levels across the organisation. Review your current recruitment process. Use your selected RPO provider to map your current recruitment processes, and then engage with them in discussing whether they are fit for purpose, and as efficient and productive as possible. There are bound to be tweaks or changes that you can make, even if you reviewed the process recently. Questions to ask: Are you relying too heavily on outdated candidate sourcing methods spending on print media, when online is cheaper and more productive? Do you allow hiring managers to make decisions on this (and spend thousands to advertise in their favourite professional journals?)

2 Is your current new vacancy approval process too lenient, or too heavy handed? Could retrospective reporting from your new technology replace the need for an approval level? Are your hiring managers too involved in the short-listing process - is this an opportunity to defer their involvement in the recruitment process till later on? Do you have a suite of competency based questions for your roles? Are they appropriate and up to date? Are you using strength and motivational based questions during your interview process? How long is it taking you to get offered employees on board? Should preemployment checking form part of the RPO to make it more efficient? What do your candidates think about your recruitment process? If you had a magic wand and could change anything what would it be? Hiring segments Define exactly what elements of your recruitment will be included within the RPO. How many recruits, and in which categories Executive, Graduate, core Permanent, Temporary or Locum? Different RPO providers might have different areas of focus, or may be able to cover all of your requirements. It might be that you need technology to cover all segments, but you may not require RPO for them all. Perhaps Executive is to be left with a panel of Search firms, managed by your in-house team. Account Management Make sure that your Account Manager and team knows as much or more about recruitment than you do. The recruitment element of an RPO is more important than the process make sure that you aren t employing a high cost administration function. Your Account team should be experts on the three main components of recruitment sourcing, screening & assessment, and on-boarding. Questions to ask are: Can your Account manager give examples of improving recruitment process elsewhere? Do they have a view on the most ideal sourcing methods for your roles? Are they comfortable with what needs to be measured in the process? Find out about the meetings cycle, the on-site/ off-site balance, and how the relationship will evolve.

3 Technology Ensure that the technology that you propose to use fits your process, not the other way around. This is far more important than the bells & whistles the system offers (see above this is however an opportunity to review your current processes but in-line with what is best for your organisation, not what fits the system). Questions to ask are: How will it use your organisational data and in turn integrate back in to your HR and financial systems? How will it import this data so that the system maps to your organisation? What will the communication with applicants look like? What does it look like on a mobile device? What is the scope of the approvals process within the system? What does the Hiring Manager see at short-list stage? Will it give you the reporting and MI that you require? How easy is it to make changes on an on-going basis, and what is the cost of this? Recruitment ratios (Quality of Hire) One main reason for appointing an RPO should be to make the recruitment process more efficient. And one of the key indicators of this are your ratios between different stages of the recruitment processes. Most important of all how many interviews have to happen per job offer, and then how long do good quality recruits stay in role? Do you know what your ratios are at present? Can the potential RPO share with you the ratios that they achieve with other clients? Cost per Hire Do you know your current cost per hire? Have you included all staff costs recruitment team and hiring managers, sourcing and advertising, maintenance of your career site and jobs pages, marketing support for branding, applicant tracking/ recruitment technology, reporting/ data analysis time and cost, and pre-employment checking and on-boarding? Now go and ask potential RPO providers how much cost per hire will be if they take over.

4 Sourcing strategies Define how much scope you want the RPO to have over generating your pipeline of job applicants. You will regularly have internal applicants for roles, and ideally they will go through the same process as external applicants, but ask how this will be managed once the RPO is in place. And how about encouraging internal recommendations something for your RPO or something to remain in-house? Do you want or need to source via social media? If so which ones and for which roles? Don t let your RPO damage your brand by churning out every single vacancy on Twitter. And make sure that you understand how this fits in with your corporate brand and social media strategies. Depending on your vacancy requirements, you may want to source fewer applicants per role. Make sure that the proposed model doesn t overly incentivise lots of applications, and that the RPO provider has ways to limit applications for over-subscribed roles. Part of the process design should define the RPOs early involvement in understanding future recruitment needs, so that they can plan sourcing strategies ahead of time. Use of recruitment agencies Some RPOs are definitely more prone to agency use than others. So do you want an RPO that effectively manages your current set of agencies, negotiates for a better deal, and introduces you to some that they have relationships elsewhere. Or do you want an RPO that works to its utmost abilities to directly source every vacancy, and only uses agencies as a last resort? Questions to ask: What percentage of vacancies that the potential RPO manages for all clients are filled by agencies? What typical % of salary does the RPO negotiate with agencies? At what level does a job vacancy automatically get passed to an agency, as opposed to being directly soured in the first instance? Remember, your employer brand doesn t differentiate between agency and non-agency. Make sure that the RPO and its technology can handle both with the same level of brand integrity.

5 Talent Pools Ensure that you and the RPO agree with terminology in this area. Are you referring to internal talent, applicants who have passed certain screening criteria, but for whom you don t currently have the right vacancy, or the vast mass of applicants that send you their CVs on spec. There is an array of talent pool types and definitions, and each need managing in different ways. Maintaining a database of individuals who have registered an interest in working for you might be more effort than the results require. Focus on nurturing the talent that has had a close brush with you in one way or another already is likely to give a much higher return. A good quality RPO will go beyond the label, and develop a talent pool that is right and meaningful for you.