How RPO technology boosts hiring agility

Many enterprises are dealing with a more complex recruitment environment, and see the need to transform their recruitment practices to be competitive.

RPO brings intelligent technology solutions that assure recruiters will find, attract and select the right candidates faster – while staying ahead of the competition.

The $2.26 billion global recruitment technology market is booming. Organizations can choose from a bewildering array of solutions including applicant tracking systems (ATS), candidate relationship management (CRM) tech, AI Sourcing, pre-hire assessments, chatbots, and much, much more.

But not every talent acquisition team has in-house access to the opportunities offered by recruitment technology. Some may face budget constraints or struggle to build a business case to justify the investment, while others may be saddled with legacy systems that do not provide the speed, efficiency, scalability, and flexibility of a modern recruitment tech stack. Many organizations have made significant investments in acquiring the latest technology but are struggling to get the best use out of it. Simply put, most talent acquisition organizations just don’t have the bandwidth required to stay ahead of the market and make best use of all the possibilities.

Luckily, there’s another way to access and leverage the benefits of recruitment technology: through partnering with a RPO solution provider.

We spoke with David Ellis, VP Talent Acquisition at Korn Ferry, to learn how hiring organizations at any maturity level can gain access to a sophisticated recruitment tech stack by partnering with an RPO solution provider.

Gain access to a leading-edge recruitment tech stack

“One of the reasons that organizations prefer to work with an RPO provider like Korn Ferry is that we provide access to an advanced and sophisticated technology hiring stack that would otherwise be out of reach to many organizations,” says Ellis.

Used intelligently, recruitment technology is a game-changer. It can reduce time-to-hire, alleviate routine or manual tasks, help organizations make better quality hiring decisions, reduce bias by leveling the candidate playing field and greatly enhance the candidate experience.

But before the hiring or procurement team begins having conversations with RPO providers about recruitment technology and process automation, they must first ask themselves a crucial question: What problems are we trying to solve?

Mandating technology without answering this question can lead to a complicated and costly path for organizations seeking RPO services.

Track the following five popular hiring metrics to improve

Quality of hire

Arguably the most important hiring metric, measuring quality of hire helps you determine if you are consistently hiring top-performing talent.

Quality of hire through performance reviews, hiring manager satisfaction, and tracking retention. Then, review your end-to-end hiring process to determine where to make targeted improvements. Perhaps you simply need a bigger talent pool? Maybe your job ads need work, or your salaries and other benefits need to be more competitive. Rather than relying on what the candidate tells you in their resume, including assessment in the hiring process is a sure-fire way to improve quality of hire.

Time to hire

Lengthy hiring processes increase direct hiring costs along with indirect costs stemming from unfilled roles in the business. Additionally, a slow hiring process increases the risk of candidates dropping out, particularly during a talent shortage.

Definitions of time to hire differ between organizations. For the purposes of this ebook, time to hire measures the time between a requisition being handed to the recruiter (or RPO) and the candidate accepting the offer.

If you find that your time to hire is slower than your industry’s average, look for bottlenecks or manual processes in your hiring funnel, such as the application process, the screening/assessment process, and the interview process.

Cost per hire

A lengthy time to hire contributes to the cost of an unfilled role to the business, which can range from 16% of a salary for a low-paying role to 213% of an executive-level salary.

This includes the associated costs of hiring a new employee, such as advertising, interviewing, screening and hiring. We must also consider the cost of onboarding a new position, including training and management time, lost productivity, the time taken for the new employee to hit peak productivity, impact on customer service, and the cultural impact on existing employees.

These costs can be lowered by optimizing and professionalizing the recruitment process and driving direct sourcing by the recruitment team. Efficiencies can be found by streamlining and automating the application process, the screening process, and through smaller tweaks such as automated interview scheduling and virtual interviews. External costs such as job ad placements and agency fees can be a powerful lever to reduce spend. Programmatic advertising tools smartly manage media budget while direct sourcing that utilizes AI sourcing technology can drastically reduce costs.

Hiring diversity

If your team is lacking diversity, one of the reasons behind this may be your recruitment processes.

Specific hiring technology can help improve diversity by addressing diverse talent pools and leveling the playing field by ignoring identifying data such as gender, age, and ethnicity when screening candidates. In combination with recruiter and hiring manager training and other measures, technology can play an important role in DE&I strategy.

Candidate experience

As explored in the previous chapter, a poor candidate experience can cause top performers to drop out of your hiring funnel. Worse, frustrated candidates may spread the word about a poor hiring process online and discourage others from applying. Recruitment technology can be leveraged to create a seamless candidate experience that prioritizes the user experience (UX) at every touchpoint, from the application stage to skills assessment, candidate communication and interviewing. Technology can also be leveraged to provide 24/7 candidate support.

Other metrics to consider tracking include candidate and hiring manager satisfaction, retention, limitation of agency usage, and perception of employer brand. Organizations should seek technology that offers flexibility, scalability, innovation, access to talent, robust systems and processes, recruiter brand protection, and value-add.

Three technology benefits to look for when partnering with a RPO provider

We asked David Ellis for his tips on assessing an RPO provider’s recruitment technology stack to help hiring organizations choose a solution that improves hiring outcomes and slashes time-to-hire.

With several RPO providers on the market, Ellis recommends that HR teams, talent acquisition or procurement professionals seek out an RPO technology offering with the following benefits.

Actionable data insights

There's a popular television cliche in which the hero – whether it’s a maverick doctor or ace detective – solves the case by relying on their instinct or “gut feel”. While this is always fun to watch, it’s also entirely unrealistic. Real results are achieved by acquiring, interpreting, and leveraging high-quality data.

What's more, relying on instinct in recruitment leads decision-makers into the murky waters of cognitive biases, including confirmation bias and likability bias. That’s why a statement such as “I have a great feeling about candidate B” should be a red flag in terms of hiring outcomes and DE&I.

There's no longer any room for gut feel or guesswork in recruiting,” notes Ellis. “Hiring decisions need to be based on actionable data.”

Korn Ferry’s RPO solution includes two key pieces of IP:

• Our Success Profiles are based on 50 years of talent science and take the guesswork out of knowing what good looks like when hiring. Creating a common hiring framework and language for requirements across the organization, they enable hiring managers to pinpoint the skillsets and mindsets they are looking for in employees. People who are a close fit with our Success Profiles are 13x more likely to be engaged on the job.
• Our AI-powered Intelligence Cloud pulls together market intelligence and Korn Ferry-owned data to provide actionable insights to support hiring decisions. It benchmarks your position against industry norms, peers and best practice, providing more context around talent assessment and your organization’s requirements. By transforming HR insight into action, the Intelligence Cloud helps put the right people in the right roles, close your potential gap, and speeds up business transformation.

Extended talent pools

Attracting the right talent has long been the number one challenge for hiring organizations, with the problem exacerbated by global skill shortages. Our own research revealed that by 2030, there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people, leading to a potential $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenues.

Talent pools limited to a company’s immediate network or geographical location will fail to attract enough candidates to address skills gaps. By leveraging the multiplying effect of RPO technology, hiring organizations gain access to a much broader global market of active and passive candidates.

And it works. Ellis notes that shortlists in hard-to- fill countries are developed up to 30% faster with Korn Ferry’s RPO technology than via traditional methods. That’s why it’s crucial to choose a partner with both a global footprint and on-ground local experience. Korn Ferry’s regional Industry Expertise and Advisory Consultants have deep local knowledge and insights, while our Recruiters are in-country, on the ground, working side-by-side with you. We understand the cultural nuances that make a big difference in hiring the best talent, while possessing both the scale and knowledge to deliver complex, global and agile RPOs.

Korn Ferry’s RPO technology also facilitates internal mobility, which is a highly effective way to fill skills gaps. “It’s quite likely that the right person to fill a vacancy is already working at your organization,” says Ellis.

Enhanced flexibility and scalability

Many organizations discover too late that although manual processes for sourcing talent, reviewing applications and moving candidates through the interview process worked well for low volume hiring, they tend to fall apart when attempting to scale up.
“This is where the right technology becomes essential,” says Ellis.
“The scalability and agility of RPO enables organizations to scale up and down with ease.”

Flexible hiring will become even more important with the rapid growth of the alternative workforce: contractors, freelancers, temp and gig workers. Hiring more workers for shorter periods creates a challenge that soon overwhelms inefficient or manual processes but can be a breeze with the right RPO tech in place.

"Speed is the key,” says Ellis. “The seamless flow of data within Korn Ferry’s RPO technology enables faster hiring, from sourcing all the way through to assessment, onboarding and development.”

The proof? Korn Ferry has leveraged our RPO technology to reduce time-to-hire across our global client base by an average of 35%.

By partnering with the right RPO provider, organizations of every size can narrow the gap between technology haves and have-nots.

For a fraction of the cost of building an in-house recruitment tech stack, hiring teams can gain access to game-changing, AI-powered RPO technology that will ultimately provide the trusted data needed to drive better hiring decisions.

RPO facts and figures

RPOs provide access to leading-edge recruitment tech

• 68% of recruiting professionals say that the best way to improve recruiting performance over the next five years is by investing in new recruiting technology.
• People who are a close fit with Korn Ferry’s Success Profiles are 13x more likely to be engaged on the job.
• Shortlists in countries where roles are hard to fill are developed up to 30% faster with Korn Ferry’s RPO technology than via traditional methods.

Speak to the RPO experts

If you need to improve your hiring outcomes, prioritize the candidate experience, extend your talent pool, and find a scalable solution that will adapt to your changing needs, Korn Ferry delivers. Learn more about Recruitment Process Outsourcing here or get in touch to speak with an expert today.