- Contingent Search – Promises to hire quickly, but charges a premium price for the speed and quality is not guaranteed
- RPO – Promises better quality of hire, at a lower cost, with an emphasis on cultural fit, but is most often used for hiring a permanent staff
Recently, a third option has gained popularity: Contingent RPO.
What Is Contingent RPO?
Contingent RPO is a hybrid model that supplies contingent labor using recruiters dedicated to your company. Unlike contingent staffing, which prioritizes speed of hire only, Contingent RPO focuses on an improved time to fill over traditional RPO models, while also emphasizing:
- Recruiting Partnership – After getting to know your business and your organization’s needs, customized solutions allow you to work with a dedicated team. This results in a partnership where the RPO firm is committed to strategically recruiting the best candidates for your business context.
- Cost Savings – Staffing agencies focus on hiring quickly, but organizations pay a premium for the increased level of effort. This often comes at the expense of quality of candidate fit. With contingent RPO, organizations see an efficient time-to-fill, but also lower costs-per-hire, so the long-term results are more sustainable.
- Quality and Cultural Fit – Even when hiring temporary workers, you still need the right fit within your company culture, together with the skills and credentials needed to do excellent work. You won’t want to jeopardize customer business or the happiness of your permanent staff by hiring ill-fitted contingent workers.
- Employer Value Proposition (EVP) – Your company’s EVP drives the way your employees perceive you, and that begins during the recruitment process. Employer branding and a positive candidate experience are better supported by contingent RPO because you’ll be hiring people that fit your culture, which sets them up for success in the long-term.
How Does Contingent RPO Work?
Contingent RPO, while focusing on quality of hire, still delivers the quantity of candidates needed for high-volume hiring initiatives:
- Direct sourcing team: Unlike staffing agencies, contingent RPO offers a dedicated recruiting team who know your company and industry. You get access to the provider’s candidate networks and recruiting technology, including existing pools of high quality talent. This means you can more efficiently source the best candidates.
- Candidate database. The candidate database belongs to your organization at the end of the agreement, including information for candidates not hired. If you need them in the future, you have their information on file. It also means the RPO provider won’t be offering your organization candidates that have been previously provided to your competitors.
- Qualitative metrics. Staffing agencies have a financial incentive to put a body in a seat FAST, or else they don’t get paid because clients will often work with more than one staffing agency at a time. By contrast, contingent RPO values skill, candidate experience, and cultural fit, what is considered qualitative metrics. You get better quality candidates while reducing your total cost of hire.
- Specialized role fulfillment. In specialized fields most notably, you can’t afford to hire the wrong person. A project’s timeline, budget, and outcomes could be in jeopardy. Contingent RPO helps fill even the most highly technical positions with people who do quality work.
- Pan for the future while also hiring quickly. Because the foundation of RPO is built for the long-term, even in a contingent model, RPO helps build sustainable longer term talent pipelines and sources candidates with the potential to transition into full-time roles.
