Recruitment partner: How external partners can improve your hiring

Partnering with an external recruiter can reduce your time-to-hire, improve your flexibility and more. Read on to find out how.

For some businesses, recruitment only comes in two forms: you can use your own in-house team to hire, or you can contract an external recruitment agency.

However, there’s another option that serves as a hybrid of the two. Companies can partner with an external recruitment firm and have them work within the organisation, using the expertise, technology and data of an agency but with the understanding and big-picture view of your business that an in-house team would have.

Sometimes called recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), this partnership sees a team of expert recruiters embedded within your company and working towards its overall goals. This can typically be a flexible arrangement, so you can use it for everything from short-term projects to long-term hiring strategies.

There are some fantastic advantages to RPO that can improve the way you hire overall, and we’ve listed just a few of them here:

Faster Hiring

It can take a long time to recruit someone new. Time-to-hire varies by industry, from admin staff taking an average of 33 days to recruit to engineers needing an average of 49 days. Location matters as well, with hiring in the UK taking an average of around 35 days. This is a crucial metric to think about, as a long time to hire means missing out on the best candidates.

One study found that 62 percent of candidates will lose interest in a role if they don’t hear anything within two weeks. After three weeks of no contact, this increases to 77 percent. Leaving candidates waiting will see you losing out on the best available talent, affecting your overall business performance.

RPO is one way you can cut down on this metric. Elite recruiters can anticipate your hiring needs due to being embedded in your business, enabling them to plan for recruitment and identify candidates on an ongoing basis. This leads to two-thirds of companies that work with an RPO provider seeing time-to-hire reduced as a result.

Manage Your Hiring Needs

How many people do you need in your recruitment team? This is not an easy question to answer. If you have too many, you will see your cost-to-hire skyrocket. Too few, and you will struggle to recruit the talent you need.

An extra challenge comes from the fluctuating needs of many businesses. You might have an urgent need for new hires one quarter, then no need for new staff at all the quarter after that.

Often a recruitment agency is brought in to manage this. However, this can lead to businesses being reactive, bringing in help when their HR department is overwhelmed rather than having this fluctuating need planned into their overall recruitment strategy. This is an area where an external recruitment partner can be extremely useful.

Not only will an external partner be embedded in your company and able to proactively assess your hiring needs, but an RPO solution is also extremely scalable. You can increase or decrease your partnership at will to match the changing needs of your business, ensuring you always have exactly the right number of recruiters at your fingertips.

Benefit From Cutting-Edge Recruitment Tec

There’s no way of disguising the fact that recruitment – like most industries – has seen vast improvements thanks to technology. However, 42 percent of recruiters are currently not using online tools or new technologies to find talent. This has become even more prominent with the rise of AI, which just 27 percent of talent professionals are making use of.

However, this is understandable for many companies. Recruitment technology is a substantial investment, not just in terms of the cost of the technology but also in the time and resources that must be dedicated to upskilling existing HR staff. This brings with it a substantial amount of risk.

Even the best technologies can end up being a wasted investment if a business is unable to take advantage of them to unlock cost savings.

An RPO partner, on the other hand, will already have access to this technology and the recruiters who know how to use it. For example, at Allen Embedded we utilise AI and machine learning in our search engine, enabling us to find a huge range of potential candidates for any role.

By partnering with other businesses, we can provide this technology and the expertise to use it to anyone who would like it.

External Partners: Making Your Recruitment More Flexible

Whatever your needs, from increased short-term hiring for an upcoming project to a long-term proactive recruitment strategy, partnering with an external firm can provide you with the expertise, technology and scalability you require. If you could hire a top recruitment team overnight – knowing you could easily scale them down when needed – why wouldn’t you?

There are many more benefits to RPO, from reduced costs to improved candidate experience. If you’d like to learn more, or start your own RPO partnership, get in touch with us today to find out more.

About Allen Recruitment

We are a team of expert recruitment consultants with offices in Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Sweden, Belgium and Poland, providing recruitment solutions and job opportunities all over Europe.

We offer temporary, permanent, contract and contingency roles in a variety of industries such as IT, Tech, Finance, Telecom, E-commerce, Engineering and more.