Outsourcing Strategies for Your Recruitment Drive


Recruitment is perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of business and management, especially for companies looking to scale up. Fully developing a marketable concept, moving it into reality, and building up your customer base all offer their own challenges — none of which can be surpassed without the right people at your side. Apart from your own hard work and vision of what you want your company to become, you’ll need the right people to move forward and truly develop as a brand and company.

The problem is that not every entrepreneur has the right skills for finding and hiring the best possible candidates. Just because you have the best research-backed products or services in your sector doesn’t mean that your company has what it takes to recruit the right team members. This is where outsourcing can help. Freelance business writer Kristina Speciale explains how proper outsourcingOpens in a new tab. can save you and your company more than 60% in operational costs alone. By leveraging the external help and expertise of other companies, platforms, specialists, and agents, you can ensure that you’re not wasting any company resources in your quest to find and hireOpens in a new tab. the best possible people for your team.

Business/Operations Analysis

One of the most damaging aspects of recruitment can be done before a candidate has even seen a job advert. Being ill-informed about your own business needs can lead to faulty hiring strategies, wasting the time and resources of everyone involved in the process. One way to solve this is through employing modern business and skills analysis. An article by Comeet on how to develop a recruitment planOpens in a new tab. details how skills gap analysis is crucial in ensuring that your current staff meet the requirements of your business. In a nutshell, conducting a skills gap analysis is a technical and systemic way of asking whether or not your own people can perform their jobs, which in turn will allow you to better narrow down what skills you should be looking for. While you can do this on your own, the reality is that you might also be too close to see the big picture or be objective about your practical needs. Thankfully, business analysis is a globally booming business; there are a number of companies and platforms that can be hired to conduct this type of analysis for your operations, allowing you to spot strengths and weaknesses that you and your employees might have missed before. Sometimes, a fresh pair of eyes is twice as efficient as a pair that’s been looking hard at something for a long time.

Candidate Data Analytics

Candidate Data Analytics

Finding the right candidates entails combing through tens if not hundreds or thousands of resumes. DocWire News picks apart how artificial intelligenceOpens in a new tab. (AI) factors into streamlining this entire repetitive process. In a nutshell, the task of reviewing resumes and comprehensive candidate data is best left in the hands of data specialists who can leverage AI algorithms to reveal patterns that are often imperceptible to human eyes. Much like how internal business analysis can help narrow down what skills you should be looking for in the first place, AI-enabled candidate data analytics can allow you to pick out the worthwhile recruits in a sea of thousands. Whether or not you have the internal capability of sifting through thousands of resumes to look for ideal recruits, the process will be much faster if you feed the data to the right AI, a task that can be outsourced to data scientists or AI-enabled data-crunching platforms.

Pre-Employment Testing

There are many different types of pre-employment testing and they’re used to measure whether or not candidates are right for the job. The Balance breaks down the different pre-employment testsOpens in a new tab. that can legally be administered to candidates of your company. This includes skills assessment, which is a straightforward way of seeing whether or not candidates can actually do the job they’re applying for. Cognitive tests are similar but broader, covering reasoning, memory, reading skills, and arithmetic ability. Physical ability tests measure not just health, but also physical attributes such as strength and reflexes — when they’re necessary to do the job. Sample job task tests simulate parts of the job for candidates, allowing both parties to see where a candidate stands on specific tasks and duties. Most if not all of these pre-employment tests can be outsourced to an external provider that can do the legwork for you. What’s important to remember here is that you need to properly brief the company or service provider to whom you’re outsourcing this aspect of recruitment. This will help ensure that the tests your candidates undergo are customized to the requirements of the job, and include no unnecessary testing that could turn off potential good hires.

Background Checks

Doing the due research on your candidates is one of the most crucial aspects of the recruitment process, and it’s also arguably the most complex and time-consuming. Depending on the level of talent that you’re looking for, background checks can be done in as little as a few hours to a couple days, weeks, or even months of verifying information from several sources. As time-consuming as it is, doing proper and comprehensive background checks can prevent bigger problems down the line. In a CareerBuilder survey on the background screening processOpens in a new tab., researchers found that 37% of employers who admit to making a bad hire indicate that the decision was due to the candidate lying about their qualifications. Whether you’re looking to hire a nanny, a software engineer, or a chief financial officer, you need to be absolutely thorough when it comes to doing background checks. It’s the only way to ensure that your candidates are who they say they are.

If you’re not a company that specializes in brokering information, there’s only so much you can learn from digging through a person’s social media presence. More often than not, it takes an external specialists to make sure that the information you have about your candidates is not just accurate, but comprehensive and indicative of their actual value to your industry.

outsource hiring

Brand Reputation Management

Yes, your brand’s reputation inevitably affects your recruitment process. If you’re looking for the smartest and most capable candidates, you should be expecting them to do background checks on you as well. Nowadays, this process is easier for most would-be hires thanks to comprehensive company/boss review platforms like Glassdoor. Not only do candidates discuss the experiences of former employees and how entry-level employees are treated, even your very recruitment process could be up for review.

This is why in terms of maintaining a smooth recruitment process, it’s important to keep a handle on how your brand is perceived. This includes streamlining your internal recruitment and job interview processes for candidate comfort and convenience. Make sure to tweak your vetting process to be as efficient as possible to avoid worthlessly taking up your candidates’ time. Apart from keeping your company’s processes efficient and candidate-focused, you can also take more direct approaches to brand reputation management.

This is where advertising agencies and brand specialists can help. Although advertisers and marketers have no direct specialization when it comes to recruitment per se, they’re the ones who can develop a respectable reputation for your brand — whether online or offline. This can range from optimizing your social media accounts to running entire months-long campaigns to get your vision and message out there. By establishing your company as an honest, no-nonsense, respectable, and essential part of your industry, you’re one big step closer to finding the right talents to hire.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) refers to the process by which a company transfers either just parts or the entirety of their permanent recruitment to an external specialist or service provider. Needless to say, it can take a lot of the stress out of the process for many companies. Whether it’s just one or two of the above-mentioned recruitment outsourcing strategies, or your company’s entire recruitment strategy, RPO can allow you to focus your time and resources on what you’re actually good at. In fact, this comprehensive recruitment outsourcing strategy has worked very well for companies that have applied it to their permanent operations. A report by People Matters explains how the RPO market is one of the fastest-growing HR markets globally, estimated to be worth $1.8bn in 2013, and ballooning to $3.3bn just four years later. Handing the task of recruitment over in it’s entirety certainly allows you take time to concentrate on other key areas and deliver a more tailored and industry-centered approach, which ultimately benefits you in the long term.

Of course, outsourcing the entire permanent recruitment process to an external force is not something that all companies are comfortable with. It’s up to you to determine which aspects of the recruitment process can and should be outsourced, which largely depends on your company’s own strengths and weaknesses. Whoever you hire to take charge of your recruitment processes, make sure that they’re well informed and properly briefed about your current goals and needs. When it’s done right, outsourcing can save you money, streamline business processes, and put you in touch with people who can actually help you scale up.


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Steve Todd

Steve Todd, founder of Open Sourced Workplace and is a recognized thought leader in workplace strategy and the future of work. With a passion for work from anywhere, Steve has successfully implemented transformative strategies that enhance productivity and employee satisfaction. Through Open Sourced Workplace, he fosters collaboration among HR, facilities management, technology, and real estate professionals, providing valuable insights and resources. As a speaker and contributor to various publications, Steve remains dedicated to staying at the forefront of workplace innovation, helping organizations thrive in today's dynamic work environment.

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