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Reducing Your Reliance on Outsourced Recruitment

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There are certainly some pros to a (partially) outsourced-recruitment approach:

  • You can have a firm with considerable experience finding prospects for niche roles (e.g., certain types of executives or engineers) source candidates for you.
  • You can assign an agency to focus on internal recruiting while your in-house talent acquisition staff focuses on engaging external candidates (or vice versa).
  • You can even partner with a full-fledged recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) firm to help you revamp your entire TA strategy and handle many core tasks.

That said, there are (far) more benefits when you ‘own’ your talent acquisition strategy outright and only turn to outsourcing solutions to fill open positions when you’re resource-starved.

In short, the cream-of-the-crop TA strategies today are operated nearly entirely by in-house recruiters — and executed with a complete ATS + CRM solution that helps them both replenish their talent pipeline with great ease, speed, and efficiency and scale their businesses.

How eliminating outsourced recruitment from your talent strategy can lead to smarter, faster hiring

Here are four big benefits to moving all of your essential recruiting activities internally — and using a complete talent acquisition suite like LeverTRM to enhance your hiring process.

Benefit #1: You can quality-control your job descriptions, sourcing, and nurturing.

Recruitment firms and RPO services are known for having robust talent pools from which they can source candidates for clients with relative ease (once they know what said clients need).

But with a platform like LeverTRM — and integrations with helpful solutions like ContactOut, which helps Lever customers sync candidates’ phone numbers and email addresses into their LeverTRM profiles with just a single click — you can ensure you add only the highest-quality prospects to your talent pipeline.

  • Moreover, you can ensure said prospects are nurtured with bespoke, on-brand, personalized messaging on an ideal schedule and cadence — not just at random, like many recruiting firms do.

“Our partnership with Lever allows our mutual customers to build a candidate-engagement approach based on the most accurate and fresh candidate data, save them time by automating critical tasks, and improve their ability to hire faster and more efficiently in this ever-changing recruitment climate,” ContactOut VP of Sales Doug Hall.

candidate journey

Benefit #2: You can provide a bespoke, high-quality CX an outside firm never could.

With bespoke communications delivered to each candidate you source, you can also provide the type of candidate experience (CX) an external recruiting function simply never can offer.

You know your company’s ‘voice’ and mission. You know, from speaking with human resources regularly, to keep your employer brand top of mind when speaking with prospective hires.

Simply put, you and your colleagues in talent acquisition know how to position your business at large and promote your active and upcoming roles better than an agency ever could.

  • The entire outsourced-recruitment business model is predicated on multiple recruiting specialists at a given agency working with multiple clients simultaneously to source and fill roles.

Consider the day in the life of an agency recruiter. They often have many other companies for whom they must conduct candidate outreach and engage with interested prospects.

That means less time and energy allocated to your own recruitment needs — and a potentially poor CX for the candidates your agency contacts with its (likely inadequate) nurture messaging.

Your talent team, on the other hand, can dedicate the requisite amount of attention needed to interact with job seekers (leading to a superior CX). What’s more, you can move them through your recruitment funnel more quickly and efficiently — especially when you leverage automated workflows, like those in LeverTRM (e.g., Fast Resume Review, dynamic offer approvals).

Benefit #3: You don’t have to wait on your agency to secure crucial recruiting data.

Another facet to consider about working with RPO solution providers on an outsourced-recruitment strategy is the fact they control the data for candidates they source for you.

That is to say, they tend not to share any of that data with your talent team.

You can’t sync it into your recruiting system of record or use it to create custom visualizations or dashboards that can help you improve in key recruiting areas (e.g., where you spend your time sourcing, what nurture messaging does and doesn’t resonate with prospects).

  • Conversely, when you own your TA efforts, that talent data is yours — and yours alone.

In turn, you can share your data with key stakeholders (e.g., your C-suite, HR leadership, and hiring managers) in a matter of minutes. You can use it to analyze individual-recruiter and overall team performance. And — most importantly — you can use it to evolve and adapt your talent strategy to realize greater hiring success in the long term.

outsourced recruitment

Benefit #4: You can save your business a lot of money (and get praise for doing so).

Budgetary concerns aren’t the talent team’s primary focus. (Well, aside from your TA director).

However, by utilizing a TA suite that offers core candidate relationship management (CRM) capabilities and powerful ATS functionality, you essentially eliminate the need to allocate recruitment marketing spend to an outside agency, thus saving your organization money.

That money may not be wholly redirected to aiding your talent team. Nonetheless, the fact your recruiting department will have saved your company money (even a modest amount) will get you recognition from your executive team (particularly your CEO and CFO).

This recognition could potentially help you garner favors with these business leaders for needs down the line (e.g., when you want to add recruiter headcount to scale your hiring efforts).

‘Owning’ your TA strategy and lessening dependence on outsourced recruitment with an ATS-CRM

As noted, there are certainly circumstances in which partnering with an RPO that has substantial recruiting resources — the kind perhaps your talent org lacks at a given moment in time — can help you meet your hiring quotas and achieve time-to-fill goals.

But, as Doug from ContactOut explained, it’s just far more effective for TA teams to use a centralized, in-house system — one in which all prospect and recruiting data is easily accessible and actionable — to source, nurture, analyze, and rediscover candidates.

“Too much time is wasted because recruiters are being asked to use fragmented technology that does not have the right data, and a tech stack that can’t talk to each other,” Doug stated.

“Giving recruiting teams one system of truth for the entire candidate journey allows them to boost productivity, decrease their time to hire, and achieve their growth goals.”

Read our LeverTRM case study for Nortal to learn how the renowned consulting firm reduced its spend on outsourced recruitment by 50%, thanks to our talent acquisition suite.