Scaling up or down in recruitment: managing costs

It’s quite unusual for an organisation to experience steady, regular recruitment volumes year in, year out, with no fluctuations. Whether it’s a global hiring freeze affecting local operations, or a special project requiring extra resources to be recruited, most businesses at times find themselves in the situation of needing to scale their recruitment teams up or down.

This can be really difficult for internal functions. Where do you re-deploy your recruiters to, when there are no roles to recruit? Do you have the headcount approval to be able to hire more recruiters when your volumes increase? Do you have access to a talent pool of recruiters who are quickly available to step in and assist?

This is where an RPO solution can really make a difference as we have the ability to scale — both up and down. We have shared services teams both on and offshore who are readily available to supplement the activities of the core team. They can do this from an onsite or offsite perspective.

Likewise, if hiring volumes drop or stop all together, we are able to redeploy recruiters to other solutions until that organisation needs them back again. And it’s not just recruiters that we are able to apply this scalability to; we have sourcing specialists and administrators who provide the same shared-service offerings.

Giving an organisation the flexibility to scale their recruitment team up and down, without having to make redundancies, increase their own headcount or massively increase their recruitment spend by relying on agencies is a key benefit of RPO and something we know our clients truly appreciate from partnering with us.