RPO, or Recruitment Process Outsourcing is a system where an employer transfers all or part of its recruitment processes to an external service provider. An RPO provider can provide its own or may assume the company’s staff, technology, methodologies, and reporting. When managed well with a quality provider, RPO can reduce time to hire by 40 percent and deliver cost savings of more than 50 percent.

When it comes to hiring beyond one-off positions, the task can seem daunting to employers. Where do you find the best talent? How do you attract that talent? How much is it going to cost to recruit on a mass scale? This is where an RPO service makes sense.

EG Workforce has established an RPO service to better service our clients, clients like one of the leading food retailers in the Midwest. Implementing EG’s RPO service, greatly impacted their bottom line and have used us to expand the service as they continue growing in other areas of the midwest.

To put it simply; EG Workforce helps bridge the gap between businesses and people by offering custom recruitment solutions designed for employers who need help hiring teams of great people, consistently, efficiently and quickly.

RPO Models – Beyond Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)

With BPO, an organization outsources the management of an internal business function to a third party expert, such as EG Workforce to drive cost, quality, efficiency, service, and scalability benefits. The third party is responsible for hiring the people and is also responsible for their ongoing performance and output. The main difference between BPO and RPO is responsible for hiring people into the company, but does not directly manage the performance of the employees they place. There are also multiple RPO models an organization can implement based on their needs.

End-to-End. This solution is used for a single market, country, region, or across the globe. It is also the most popular type of RPO service – like what EG Workforce Solutions offers. Likewise, the RPO solution may focus on a specific business division, role family (e.g. retail), or enveloping all hiring across the company.

Project RPO. This solution allows an organization to hire a team of experienced talent acquisition recruiters to quickly fill a specific need within a specific time frame. This includes projects such as recruitment back-logs, launching a new hourly team, meeting an unplanned or unexpected hiring boom, or talent sourcing.

On-demand. This solution is like Project RPO, but instead involves having one or a few outsourced recruiters join your talent acquisition team for a specific project or time period.

Lastly, your company can also leverage an outsourced provider to build your contingent workforce, like EG Workforce Solutions, ensuring you have access to a high-value talent pool whenever needed.

Why RPO Makes Good Business Sense

Reducing turnover is a top priority for most employers, but in the hourly workforce of large retail organizations, the impact of losing talent can have a devastating effect. The Midwest retailer that EG serviced was experiencing a high level of turnover in the ten stores that made up their Kentucky and Ohio market. The Center for American Progress estimates the cost to replace the average hourly employee to be $3,400, factoring in loss of sales, overtime to fill in the gaps in addition to the efforts to recruit, onboard, and train.

RPO services go beyond just filling roles; this makes it different from traditional recruiting. The goal of RPO is about improving how an organization recruits overall. RPO will also look at turnover rates, technology, scalability, and how much time it takes to fill a position. It streamlines hiring processes for bulk positions, so your talent team has more time to focus on finding the best talent for the one-off positions and retaining current employees.

With an employee base of about 3,000 across ten stores, the retailer was facing a very high annual turnover rate, which equated to a loss of almost $14M per year. The company knew that rather than competing for new staff, they needed to better retain the talent that was already under their roof.

Our RPO service drives meaningful conversations with the retailer’s hourly work-force. The outreach was conducted at five critical touch-points throughout the first 90 days of employment with an additional exit interview for recently separated employees.

The use of phone interviewing for understanding employee behavior as opposed to an emailed survey proved key for three important reasons:

-The employees felt more engaged in the conversation and appreciated that their employer was taking the time to gain their personal feedback.
-Proactively calling each employee increased the response rate as compared to a mass email.
-More qualitative feedback was able to be collected through engaged conversation and verbatim comments.

By determining common trends among the departing workforce and gauging the level of employee satisfaction, EG Workforce Solutions empowered the client with actionable items to positively influence employee retention.

In just three months’ time, annualized turnover was reduced by 24%, resulting in an estimated cost-savings of over $3.5M each year.

Benefits of RPO Service

Shorten time to hire. RPO reduces your time-to-hire by over 40 percent, lowering your company’s lost productivity due to open vacancies.

Reduce cost per hire. Save your company money by drastically decreasing your average cost-per-hire.

Talent data for continuous optimization. With EG’s RPO service, your company will have access to talent data with tangible insights to inform your hiring decisions. This data includes talent mapping, turnover trends and workforce planning. Your company will increase efficiencies, more accurately forecast future hiring needs, and identify process improvements.

Gain transparency through reporting. Measure and track performance through consistent reporting on KPIs and service level agreements (SLAs).

Access additional sourcing channels. If you are in a niche sector and need hard to find skill sets, your company will be able to leverage previously untapped sourcing channels to find additional candidates.

Access expertise. Utilizing EG Workforce’s RPO will provide your company access to experienced recruiters as an extension of your team.

About EG Workforce Solutions

We’ve been in this business for decades and have developed a deep network of professional connections. Whether they’re companies looking for talent, job seekers looking for work or an up-and-coming store in need of some temporary help, we know the right people to bridge the gap between the hiring and the hired.

But what’s more, we get to know people. From employers hiring to candidates looking, we take the time to listen and learn. We hear your likes, talents, and needs. We gain an understanding, and with it, we’re able to facilitate lasting relationships between businesses and people.