For most businesses, recessionary periods tend to trigger significant changes in hiring demand and requirements.

These trends spur many companies to reevaluate their recruitment processes and cost structures, particularly as they pertain to talent acquisition.

Of course, it doesn’t take a recession, or even signs of one, for a business to evaluate talent models.

High-performing HR leaders regularly consider the pros and cons of all possible hiring strategies. They are keen observers of workplace signals for outsourced recruitment, in-house, or a blend of both.

Each strategy is worthy of review, but cost is always a driving factor.

How much financial risk does your business want to accept? How much long-term investment can it reasonably support?

Let’s talk more about cost, and how recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) helps manage it.

Discover three benefits of RPO, in terms of business cost management.

1. Cost reduction through shared risk

When a business downturn hits and recruiting needs suddenly drop, so does a company’s need for recruiting staff.

Likewise, when the business is expanding into another product category or region of the world, recruiting needs may suddenly spike.

Outsourcing the recruitment function allows a company to pass along the cost risk of those resources to the business partner. Recruitment outsourcing partners accept the responsibility of efficiently adjusting resource levels when hiring fluctuations happen. As a result, the client does not bear the burden of carrying unnecessary staff.

Similarly, the client faces a lesser chance of being short-staffed when greater resources are required.

2. Faster time to hire

Time is money and hiring new professional level employees takes a lot of both. From sourcing resumes to conducting interviews and negotiating offers, acquiring a new employee taxes your internal resources.

Plus, each day a job requisition remains unfilled, your business loses the benefit of that employee’s contribution. Recruiting and budgetary resources are pulled away from other high-value initiatives.

Outsourcing all or part of your internal recruitment function can dramatically reduce your time to hire.

3. Streamlined recruitment processes

One of the most common problems we see with the recruitment life cycle is that it’s a disjointed and uncoordinated multitude of practices—good and bad—across organizational functions, departments, divisions and regions.

Often, this causes overlap in advertising purchases, training and on-boarding procedures. It leads to poorer hiring decisions and higher operational costs.

Piloting an RPO project gives you the opportunity to rethink these processes. The RPO vendor will help examine your recruitment process workflow(s) to determine where overlap, excessive cost, and inefficient practices may exist.

Then, an outsourced model can be custom designed, providing you with service levels and success metrics that exceed the status quo.

These practices yield increased efficiency and satisfaction with the recruitment life cycle, resulting in overall cost reduction for your company.

All of these factors contribute to achieving lower cost per hire – your ultimate goal.

There are many reasons to consider the benefits of RPO. Among those reasons, greater operational cost efficiency is always an organizational imperative.

In sum, a collaborative RPO partnership provides:

• A global database of thousands of screened, specially skilled professionals and sourcing channels that significantly increases your talent pipeline.
• Access to a greater amount of recruiting and screening professionals than you can carry on your own staff, who can scale their volume of work with the requisition load.
• Vendor and process management that allows you to focus on making hiring decisions while leaving the less strategic administrative duties to your RPO partner.