With the recruitment market going through a challenging period, is it now a good time to seriously consider outsourced recruitment…with a difference?
Let’s cut to the chase here. Recruitment is tough right now. And that’s mainly because it keeps changing. No sooner do companies get on top of their hiring plans and strategies than candidate behaviour changes or there’s a downturn and they need to reprioritise. (Or the world shuts down again and they need to pivot.)
Considering people are the most important part of any business, it’s not an ideal situation to be in. Many teams are still bouncing back or recalibrating after the effects of 2020/21 and just don’t have the capacity to to keep up with the changes and challenges.
Hiring managers are coming to us saying things like:
- “I just don’t have the capacity to go searching for the best candidates”
- “I can’t hire the best people so I’m continually backfilling”
- “Aligning the full team on our expectations is impossible”
- “There’s just not enough candidates on the market”
- “We’re launching in a new location and have no knowledge of the market”
In short, there’s a lot going on and not enough people or knowledge to do it.
Candidates Want to be Wooed
One of the biggest issues companies are coming across right now is that candidates’ expectations are growing. They want more flexibility, more freedom and they want their employers to stand for something.
At a recent HR and TA Leaders Forum we held, Aktana’s Kate Terrell said:
“When I started my career work was work, social was social. Our talent now want us to take a stand on social issues. That’s a really important needle for a company to thread. We need to give people a sense of belonging.”
In addition to that, candidates want more engagement. Contacting them at each stage of the process is no longer enough. They want to be continually updated and they want processes to take much less time. Some of our clients are reporting that their time to hire has halved over the last few years, mainly driven by candidates being in multiple processes or being counter-offered more often.
Quality Candidates Are Thin on The Ground
Despite the growing expectations of candidates, the truth is, there is still the age-old issue of a lack of quality candidates – especially for specialised or niche roles.
That means teams are spending more time searching for good candidates that fit their needs, rather than just accepting applications. More time searching means they’re spending less time doing other important parts of a HR or TA role.
Add the fact that a lot of businesses don’t have the necessary tech to do deep searches and it’s all seeming just a bit too challenging for many.
Enter Outsourced Recruitment
Mention outsourcing or RPOs to many companies and they baulk. It’s associated with high costs, long contracts, and inflexibility.
But it doesn’t need to be like that.
At Solutions Driven, we’ve typically worked on business critical or niche roles, requiring less than 10 positions to be filled. However, a couple of years ago, our clients started coming to us with the issues listed above, saying that they needed more help. Shutdowns had affected their teams hugely, and they either couldn’t hire recruiters to recruit, or they didn’t want to grow their team right now but needed more capacity.
A Different Kind of Outsourced Recruitment
It was then we realised the recruitment market needed another outsourced recruitment option. They needed an option that:
- Was flexible enough that they didn’t feel hemmed in, while operating in a volatile business world
- Could offer them various types of recruiters who could slot into their team
- Didn’t just give them the first recruiters available, but matched them people with the skills and qualifications needed
- Followed a specific process that guaranteed accountability
- Used data and intelligence to secure results
So, taking all the knowledge of the last two decades, we created SD Embedded. An embedded recruitment option that did all of the above.
It was our intention to create something that worked perfectly for internal teams and helped solve the problems caused by the current state of the recruitment market. Not another outsourced recruitment company, built on principles from 10 years ago.
And we think we’ve done that.
Don’t believe us?
We’ve written an ebook, focussed on how embedded recruitment can solve the issues in the current market. It runs through what the issues with RPOs and outsourced recruitment currently are and how a more accountable, thorough solution is available.
