In times of economic uncertainty, it may make sense for your business to look beyond hiring with a fully in-house team. But what outsourced recruiting option should you choose?
This article walks through the cost effectiveness of two common options for outsourcing your recruiting: RPOs and Elastic Recruiting.
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPOs) versus Elastic Recruiting
As a startup navigating today’s economy, you may be considering outsourced recruitment as a way to stay agile with changing hiring needs. There are two primary options to consider: an RPO and Elastic Recruiting.
What is an RPO?
Also known as Recruitment Process Outsourcing, an RPO is a traditional option for outsourcing your hiring and HR functions. An RPO provides you with a third-party that handles some or all of your recruiting — this is a fully traditional outsourcing option, where the RPO assumes responsibility for recruiting with little or no input from your business. Accordingly, an RPOs pricing model is traditional too. You’ll encounter more static costs and a variety of add-on fees. RPOs tend to be designed for enterprises recruiting hundreds of positions.
What is Elastic Recruiting?
Comeet’s Elastic Recruiting is a hybrid in-house/outsourced option that provides a concierge recruiting service — one that also lets you decide how much control and participation you want over the hiring process. Elastic Recruiting is powered by Comeet’s hiring platform and driven by a remote recruiting team of talent experts. The service scales up and down with your hiring needs and adapts to your process. As a result, your monthly costs can seamlessly adjust based on your budget and your hiring volume. Elastic Recruiting is designed for small- and medium-sized businesses with often-fluctuating hiring needs.
How RPOs and Elastic Recruiting Compare
Collaboration Across the Hiring Team
- RPO: No platform provided, so collaboration is often handled manually by each respective party.
- Elastic Recruiting: Comeet’s platform increases collaboration between hiring managers, recruiters, and candidates. It’s also highly conducive to recruiting remotely and for a distributed team.
Data and Insights
- RPO: Your outsourced RPO controls the data and shares with you on your request. This risks limited data being shared on an ad-hoc basis.
- Elastic Recruiting: Comeet’s platform provides full access to all past candidates, content, and tools generated during hiring — get insights whenever you sign into the platform.
Candidate Experience
- RPO: Limited visibility into the candidate experience that your outsourced team is creating.
- Elastic Recruiting: Your Elastic Recruiting team uses the Comeet platform to standardize an exceptional candidate experience — whether remote or in person. You can monitor and measure performance easily with the platform.
Engagement Type
- RPO: Typically requires long-term contracts that offer stability, but can feel inflexible if your hiring needs change and thus don’t scale with you. Your outsourced team is more of a vendor than a partner, delivering candidates without much insight into the process or the performance.
- Elastic Recruiting: Includes an “elastic” engagement that scales up and down with you, staying agile with you as your hiring changes. Your team is an extension of your own, adapting to your hiring styles and providing visibility across every stage of the process.
Costs of Using an RPO
Most RPOs use a two-part pricing model that includes a monthly subscription fee and a performance fee.
With an RPO, the monthly subscription fee is typically set at the beginning of your relationship based on your expected hiring volume. While this means you’ll have a predictable monthly fee, this flat fee also means that you’ll pay it even if you’re not hiring at the volume you’d expected. But if your volume exceeds what you expected, your monthly fee will often rise accordingly.
RPOs apply performance fees when you successfully make a hire. The fee’s cost may vary. Sometimes it’s based on the annual salary of each hire made, for example, while sometimes it’s based on each offer made.
In addition, some RPOs will include fees like management fees; sourcing fees; and/or fees for “extra” steps that go beyond the RPO’s scope, such as reference checks.
Costs of Using Elastic Recruiting
Simply put, Elastic Recruiting saves your business up to 60% compared to an RPO.
The pricing model is similar to an RPOs, where you’ll pay a monthly subscription and a performance fee. So how does Elastic Recruiting save you money over an RPO?
These four factors play a big role:
- Lower performance fees than traditional Recruitment Process Outsourcing. RPO fees can be complex and include a variety of add ons. Generally, RPO fees can be per transaction, per slate, per hire — or, they could follow a management fee model or management fee + cost per hire model. Elastic Recruiting’s success fees are simple: six to ten percent, based on the time to hire.
- Increased control over price. Elastic Recruiting is just that: elastic. The costs can easily scale up and down based on your hiring needs that month.
- A 60-day guarantee that if a hire made via Elastic Recruiting doesn’t work out within 60 days, we’ll refund 100% of the performance fee.
- Added bonus of Comeet’s award-winning recruiting platform. When signing up for Elastic Recruiting as a new customer, you get a free annual subscription to the Comeet Platform — worth thousands of dollars!
It’s important to know that pricing models vary based on your company and its hiring needs. It’s worth exploring what each option would look like for you, and how much it would cost.
Here at Comeet, we’re committed to helping your business’s hiring process stay cost effective, whatever the landscape. Let’s chat about how Elastic Recruiting can help your business.
