by Kateryna Boiko
In the race to find new approaches in acquiring talent from around the world, companies step back from the traditional recruitment process and outsource their employees. The demand for hiring dedicated development teams is at a peak as it saves costs, drives efficiency, and maintains top-notch quality. Let’s define what Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO from here on out) is, what’s its value for the company is, and what it has to do with change management.
RPO in Details
RPO stands for the approach of hiring remote teams through the recruitment team of a vendor. A company X goes to CEE country to hire, let’s say, DevOps engineer. It discovers a company Y that claims that they will provide a shortlist of suitable candidates within the shortest period of 1-2 weeks. Mutually agreed, the RPO journey begins.
How Do You Implement RPO?
It all starts with planning, defining the goals, discovering the destination for recruitment process outsourcing services to establish proper guidelines for the vendor’s recruitment team to get started with hiring. The implementation of RPO takes several stages that vary depending on the company’s deadlines, requirements, and business objectives.
#1: Pre-Planning
During this initial stage, a company and vendor define the constraints within the client’s company, identify business goals, strategies, views, and other aspects that might influence the recruitment process. For some organizations, it takes a bulk of the time, while other organizations have a clear vision of their needs, thus manage the preplanning stage shortly.
#2: Creating an Accurate Candidate’s Profile
Probably one of the most important aspects to consider for a client is to construct an ideal candidate profile, in particular, hard and soft skills, experience, education, motivation drivers, strengths and weaknesses, professional and life goals, any sort of details for a vendor to find a perfect match.
#3: RPO’s Launch
Normally, a vendor starts researching for candidates by analyzing its so-called “bench staff”. This kind of staff includes a vendor’s internal employees that might be suitable, and, if available at the moment, offered to the client, otherwise, they start looking for the candidates outside.
#4: Pre-Hiring
After the vendor determines a shortlist of candidates, it is now a client’s turn to assess them: give test assignment to check the technical skills, ask for portfolios or other proofs of experience, find out a personal connection to make sure the person fits the company’s philosophy and values.
#5: Set Things Up
When the client has built a team, it is highly important to define communication tools, feedback systems, discuss the project’s execution details (including deadline, tech stack peculiarities, task tracking), and other crucial details to make the best out of cooperation.
The Benefits of RPO
There are always reasons behind any business decision, and in the case of RPO implementation, the drivers of such practices are its benefits. First of all, outsourcing staff considerably saves time and money, as the recruitment team of a vendor knows how to do it right, in a set deadline, and according to your financial capacities. Second, you have access to a huge pool of IT talents presented on the global market, which means that you receive the required tech expertise, quality of services, and innovations. Recruitment process outsourcing benefits include the opportunity to invade new markets as it allows you to promote the product overseas, enrich target customers, and build a competitive stance. Last but not least, a vendor can assist you in change management consulting to guarantee team involvement and commitment to your project.
Change Management in RPO
Whether minor or fundamental, a change leads to people’s frustration, fear of the unknown and a long period of adaptation. Therefore, change management (CM) remains a crucial practice in RPO to maintain employees’ motivation and overall satisfaction. The announcement of upcoming change causes five stages of responses, mainly, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. So in order to smooth out the process and prevent dramatic consequences, change management in RPO is integral.
Interested to learn more about change management training?
How to Use CM Smartly
As defined above, CM is essential to mitigate the negative effects of change implementation. So here are some points to consider.
#1: Introduce and Explain: Employees must have a clear understanding of what the change is about, what does it give, why it is important, and how it may affect their daily routine. Make sure to reveal the potential challenges first, and end the presentation or meeting on a positive note.
#2: Measure and Assess: During the change implementation in RPO, it is important to see the difference between before and after. But most important is to inform the employees about this. Moreover, they should understand what their contribution is and if they do it right.
#3: Feedback: Proper communication is key to success in any business operations, especially when you change certain patterns of your organization. With this in mind, employees should receive constant feedback about their performance to analyze their weaknesses and achievements. This might considerably boost their motivation and productivity, thus the process of change management runs smoothly.
Key Points
RPO services continue to gain momentum globally, giving the companies the opportunity to save on labor costs, receive world-class tech expertise, and expand the boundaries of business operations.
RPO takes several stages, including proper planning and constructing a profile of an ideal candidate. Hiring remote teams requires proper change management implementation, guarantees proper employee adaptation, and facilitates further change to settle in. Since change management deals with people, it is vital to go through the steps of its implementation to RPO with proactivity and responsibility. The IT world forces us to follow modern approaches in order to be competitive and recognized. So if that’s your strategy, take an innovative eye and outsource your teams to get better quality of products, fast hiring process, and smart costs.
