Staffing is the process of hiring candidates to fill vacancies in a company. But staffing agencies do a lot more than just hire candidates. Apart from recruitment, staffing agencies manage employee records, maintain employee relations, and track their performance. Staffing agencies are professionals who are responsible for finding the right talents for organizations to grow and excel in their businesses.
Recruitment Process Outsourcing is a business process where companies take help from external service providers to handle their recruitment system. RPO providers take care of the entire process of recruitment, from screening potential candidates to hiring new employees. It’s a lengthy process where service providers find potential talents from various sourcing channels such as social media, professional networks, and employee referrals. They also run thorough background checks on the employees before hiring them. Also, after the selection of the candidates, the RPO providers arrange orientation programs to make sure the employees have settled in well with the company.
In this article, we will highlight all the similarities and dissimilarities between these two processes to find out how staffing differs from RPO.
The key areas of difference between staffing agencies and RPO service providers:
Collaboration and partnership:
RPO service providers will make deep connections with your company to understand the business first and then come up with the best solutions to evolve your company’s talent acquisition program. Your company’s RPO team could be working offshore or could be sitting on site, or from a combined situation. They will take your company’s name as their email domain while communicating.
Whereas a staffing agency do all the work before hiring candidates from sourcing to screening to selecting candidates. They do not get involved after recruitment. They also keep their own company’s name while communicating with the candidates.
Mode of work:
An RPO team is basically hired to control and manage the entire recruitment process of an organization. They will first examine your company’s current recruitment
condition and then introduce the best practices to upscale your recruitment strategy. They understand your company’s unique needs and provide satisfactory employee experience. On the other hand, staffing agencies deal with multiple companies at a time.
Staffing agencies fulfil your company’s short-term goal by outsourcing eligible candidates. They are just responsible for finding the right talent and won’t sit around to come up with the best recruitment strategy for your company.
Talent Pooling:
Partnering with a professional RPO team will help your company build a solid talent pool, keeping in mind future recruitment needs. While staffing agencies also have a pool of talents in their stock they are not necessarily meant for your company. They are more reactive in their approach, focusing just on filling vacancies with suitable candidates.
Talent Advisory:
RPO partners provide talent advisory consulting keeping in mind employer branding, marketing strategies, talent acquisition strategies, assessment, and workforce planning. They will not just attract potential talents but also create advanced strategies to retain these talents.
Staffing agencies revolve around filling vacancies by using their own marketing tools and strategies. They will promote your company to find the right candidate under their own company’s name and brand. They don’t provide any talent advisory consultancy.
Tech Consultancy:
Along with talent advisory consultancy, RPO partners also provide tech consultancies to organizations in terms of introducing the latest technologies to improve company’s recruitment strategies. Latest technological inventions include artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analysis. And all these can be used to attract the right kind of talents for your company. RPO providers often help businesses map out the perfect recruitment strategy by introducing new tools that will work well with your business. While partnering with a staffing agency, most companies are not comfortable sharing the company’s recruitment technology with them. In such cases, mostly the hiring manager and the in-house team are in control of all the tools used by the company for seamless recruitment process.
Reporting and analyzing recruitment results:
Your RPO team offers reporting on the recruitment results using all sorts of metrics, KPIs and SLAs. In the report, they will include all the details of the recruitment including time taken to hire, cost per hire and source of hire. There are some pro level RPO providers who designed dashboards using all the latest technologies to display recruitment data based on recruiter, location, candidate NPs, role, etc. Also, RPO partners have immense knowledge on labor market analysis that can help you understand the business market better. However, staffing agencies are not responsible for providing reports on recruitment.
Conclusion:
Both staffing agencies and RPO providers are essential for companies to meet their recruitment goals. While both serve different purposes, you need to choose the one that is right model for your business.
