As positive economic sentiments start touching the business at the ground level, hiring is once again on the rise. Organization are looking at alternative models of recruitment delivery to fit their new business needs, whether is fulfilling new business demands, bringing on board niche skills that are required for execution of business plans, bringing consistency and efficiency in the recruitment process or jumping on the need of the hour to focus on what is core and outsource the rest. 

According to the latest report by Everest Research Group, the global RPO market had estimated growth of 25% in the year 2012. Cost cutting factor remains the main catalyst driving the RPO market. The Indian RPO market is estimated to be $ 2.5 billion and is expected to grow at 35-40%.

But yet the concept of RPO, its benefits and how to make a great partnership happen is a question mark for many CHROs and Business Leaders. People Matters & Randstad started a series of roundtable discussions across cities to bring the community together and explore how RPO can eventually bring tremendous value to businesses when there is maturity and readiness to ripe benefit.  Here are the main ingredients for a successful RPO partnership

- RPO will work best when manpower planning process is mature or at least maturing. Organization’s maturity on its ability to link business and manpower planning and have a reasonable predictability on the kind of talent required during the year will be the foundation for the RPO partnership. There are no ‘talent vending’ machines when it comes to talent and if the business will require a particular talent for particular skills, advance planning and notice will be required for fulfilling these positions.

- Be clear what your organization aspires to achieve. RPO is still in a nascent stage in India but End-to-End RPO is catching up with the promise of great savings for organizations that look at long term partnerships. There are positives and negatives to each model, organizations will need to understand what is driving the need for RPO? Is it cost reduction, is it time of fulfillment, etc and accordingly what is the best suitable model?

- Decide what is core and what is not in your recruitment function. Good way to assess that is by answering the question – what are the problems ONLY I can solve? Focus on solving problems that only you can solve, those are core. The rest give them to somebody else.

- Learn from the journey that IT experiences towards Cloud. The journey towards RPO is also similar. Starts with apprehensions, challenges, teething problems but eventually is a one-way street. Business will need best-in-class process and technology and at the same time will aim to have flexibility and variability. Look at transitioning towards RPO as a change management process.

- There is no silver bullet. Know what you expect from your RPO relationship and be willing to invest management bandwidth, focus on building trust and give feedback for improvement. After all, Everest reports that companies which have adopted the RPO model are capable to save at least 25% of recruitment cost and in addition internal HR personals get the time and opportunity to involve themselves with core HR strategic issues.

Are you ready to lead the transformation?