RPO for the SME

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) has grown steadily over the past 10+ years as major organisations, who hire multiple thousands of new employees per annum outsource their recruiting needs to traditional RPO companies – but where does that leave RPO for the SME?. Is there a similar option for companies that are in the key SME space? SME’s, the Small to Medium Sized Enterprise business sector collectively employ nearly 14 million people and are responsible for almost 50% of UK GDP.

With large scale volumes hiring and recognizable brand large organisations have effectively 2 choices when it comes to meeting their recruiting needs: to build their own internal recruiting capability hiring a team of experienced recruitment consultants and provide them with the appropriate candidate identification tools and infrastructure to enable them to successfully recruit; or to contract with RPO organisations to outsource all of their recruitment requirements.

Smaller organisations, those companies within the SME sector, who are employing between 100 and 1,500 staff , do not have these options available to them. They have neither the size nor procurement power of the larger corporates and headcount growth volumes do not justify a business case for creating an internal recruitment capability. This means that the SME’s, without the benefit of having an RPO for the SME solution, have had to rely on the most costly and generally least effective solution for recruitment – the use of recruitment agencies to provide their recruiting needs. High use of agencies also means additional effort of the SME’s part as all of the recruitment-related activities (screening CVs, arranging and conducting interviewing….) are likely to be carried out by the Directors and Senior Executives, who should ideally be focusing their time and efforts on growing and managing the business.

Six years ago, Jeremy Wright & Scott Russell, co-founded cph with the aim of achieving 1 objective to provide SME’s, Small to Medium Sized Enterprises, an alternative to the strong reliance on agencies and managing their own recruitment. Essentially a RPO for the SME offering for the Small to Medium sized Enterprise space. After speaking with Directors and management teams of a number of start-up, as well as established SME’s, they created an offering that delivered all of the benefits of a RPO for the SME - organisations that are looking to recruit smaller numbers of new employees. Over the past 6 years cph has successfully helped a wide range of SME’s, Small to Medium Sized Enterprises achieve significant reductions in recruitment expenditure through its RPO for the SME offering. To date cph has delivered >£3m in recruiting costs by providing each client their own ‘internal’ direct candidates sourcing capability massively reducing the reliance on recruitment agencies for the sourcing of new employees.

cph’s RPO for the SME solution is straight forward and highly effective. It comprises the use of cph’s accredited recruitment consultants who work on its client’s site exclusively for each client and manage the whole recruiting process from open job requisition, candidate identification, qualification, and interview process management through to offer and acceptance – the entire recruiting process. The size of cph’s onsite team is determined by the headcount volumes and can be from as little as 1 person part time up to a full team of 12+. In every case the recruitment consultants work totally onsite with HR and the client Management team.

By adopting cph’s RPO for the SME offering ALL of cph’s clients have realised significant benefits compared to the agency approach and perhaps more interestingly ADDITIONAL benefits above and above those a large corporate will realize through the use of a more standard RPO solution. Cph for the SME client benefits include:

A reduction in candidate Time to Hire;
The creation of additional time for the management/executive team and HR by freeing them up from the process of recruitment;
A step-up ion candidate quality due to continual focus by the internal team exclusively on each client’s requirements, combined with active headhunting for > 40% of roles;
Significant improvements to client company employer brand which is key for SME’s;
Significant reduction in 1st year attrition – first year attrition is the most expensive attrition;
A greatly improved candidate experience;
Achievement of all client headcount requirements year on year.

The RPO for the SME solution cph provides is extremely flexible, and can be scaled up or down to effectively support clients headcount growth plans. As a result, cph is growing quickly, the benefits of its offerings are being realized and demand for its services continues to grow with in the SME space.

cph has proven that RPO for the SME space does work effectivley. If managed correctly, it can in fact not only deliver the benefits of a traditional RPO offering but more importantly actually provide further, greater value through a fully onsite combined with direct sourcing – without the use of agencies approach. There now exists a genuine value adding option for RPO for the SME.

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