Five years ago, a global technology provider made a difficult decision. They called in 100 of their recruiters, housed in various regions throughout the country, and laid them all off.

One hundred professionals who had made their careers finding top talent for the organization, were, in an instant, rendered superfluous. Certainly it came with pain for those employees. But just as important, this difficult scenario showcases the changing nature of recruitment, and how more and more companies are choosing to an outsourced recruiting solution to satisfy the tactical skillsets of talent recruitment in order to focus on the core competencies of human resources.

To this day, the company in question, who will remain anonymous, maintains a robust HR department. In fact, the department has more staff now than before it laid off its recruiters. Those professionals, however, are focused on the increasing complexities of HR management, as payroll, compliance, legal, and talent acquisition become increasingly sophisticated and demand more time, resources, and money. 

Companies today have to comply with an array of workplace rules and regulations, many of which come with significant penalty when ignored or breached. At the same time, increased globalization complicates payroll, taxation, culture, and legal issues.

One solution is recruitment process outsourcing.

This company, for instance, found that by turning its recruitment over to a fulltime, outside specialist, they were able to leverage an array of new ideas and strategies that were simply unavailable to in-house recruiters.

When you choose to outsource recruiting, HR departments gain the following recruitment benefits from their RPO partners:

• The ability to leverage social media. For a plethora of reasons, countless corporations struggle to fully leverage the power of social media, especially in their recruitment processes. In many organizations, social media might be controlled by marketing teams or hindered by legal compliance issues. RPO providers avoid those pitfalls and can use their existing social media channels to source an array of positions.
• Outreach to talent communities. Specialized RPO providers often have reach and access into targeted talent communities that a single corporation could never achieve. Their unique domain knowledge and presence allows them to fill jobs more quickly and efficiently by tapping these rich talent pools.
• A logistically rich pipeline approach. Many corporations recruit on an as-needed basis. When a position opens, they reach out to the market. This one-and-done approach fails to create a recruitment pipeline of candidates who are in various stages of the employment process. RPOs are uniquely designed to build a logistics pipeline of candidates that can be quickly onboarded as positions become available.

“The ability to find the right person for the right job at the right time is not a random undertaking, but rather part of a recruitment framework that constantly attracts a candidate and moves them efficiently through the process in order to ensure talent at the moment of need,” says Matt Rivera, Director of Customer Solutions at Yoh.

The most significant benefit of RPO is its ability to free HR talent to focus on core business objectives instead of the tactical nature of recruitment. One company’s decision to exit the recruitment game resulted in better overall corporate performance by refocusing investments and HR on increasingly sophisticated challenges.