Here's what you should know about RPO for IT sector

Is your company planning to hire new employees this year in the IT/tech area? Do you know how you’re going to attract this hard-to-find talent?

There are numerous ways of tackling this challenge:

• Your internal TA team could be tasked with recruiting this talent, assuming that the requirements are not beyond their capacity and expertise.
• External recruitment agencies could be appointed to help out when needed. It’s important to keep an eye on the costs though as these can escale quickly.
• RPO could be a helpful solution.

RPO is what brings together your internal team and external resources. What’s more, it’s highly flexible, responsive to market and more cost-efficient than any other solutions.

RPO has proven to be especially beneficial for hiring in the tech sector where we’re seeing a significant shortage of experienced professionals across the globe. 

The consequences of failing to fill IT vacancies range from mild to severe:

• The ability to serve clients might decrease.
• Productivity might drop. 
• The pace of innovation could slow down.
• These could lead to reduced competitiveness.
• Employee engagement could be expected to drop.
• While the compensation costs would increase.

There are several things that can be done in the area of recruitment and talent acquisition that companies engage in to ensure their hiring targets are met.

Innovative hiring strategies

Internal TA teams can be upskilled and prepared to engage in the new, innovative hiring strategies. Using methods and tools that aren’t commonly utilized by other businesses such as gamification and VR, can help to reach and catch the attention of passive and hard-to-attract candidates.

Untapped and under-tapped talent pools

Sourcing talent among groups such as those with invisible disabilities, criminal records, older people or stay at home parents is another effective method of finding candidates with niche, hard-to-find skills. While it requires establishing processes and relationships that aren’t in place, if conducted properly, it can help business find untapped pools of highly talented and diverse candidates.

Partnerships with educational organisations

The trick here is to get on the radar of the future professionals before they even finish their courses. Partnering up with colleges and other relevant training centres allows businesses to build talent pools early in the process and nurture future candidates throughout their journey of acquiring relevant skills. 

Working with 3rd party providers 

All the above methods of sourcing and recruiting hard-to-find tech talent require a certain amount of skill, experience and resource.

While hiring requirements fluctuate, it can be challenging for internal TA teams to compete with full-time IT recruitment consultants for talent in this drying out pools of candidates. This is why organisations often turn to recruitment agencies for help. However, managing agencies along with conducting recruitment processes in-house can generate a high volume of work overwhelming in-house teams.

With the volume of work reaching beyond the capacity of internal teams, the costs of recruitment rise and the processes slow down. This is where RPO comes into play.

RPO for IT sector

Increasingly, companies in the tech sector have been considering RPO as a more efficient way to build ‘warm’ talent pools, get ahead of the market, and reduce time to hire.

The cost aspect of getting the hiring strategy wrong and using traditional agencies during significant volume hiring cannot be ignored, which makes RPO an outsourcing model to turn to. The ‘outsourcing’ as a strategy has seen high demand in the past few years, as companies seek to reduce the average cost per hire in their sourcing strategy.

There are a few different outsourcing models available on the market with some of those being specifically designed to address the challenge of talent and skills shortages. Most solutions are highly flexible, which means that the in-house TA or HR teams are supplemented and supported by the external provider in the capacity, and when required.

If you would like to discuss different strategies to overcome hiring challenges that your company is facing, please get in touch with us to arrange an informal chat with one of our experts.