Replacing an Underperforming RPO with a Scalable, Flexible Partnership
Situation: The company’s incumbent RPO provider struggled to keep pace with hiring demand and consistently deliver quality candidates.
A promotional products company’s hiring demand regularly exceeded the capacity of its internal talent acquisition team. To provide additional recruiting capacity, the company had engaged an RPO provider to manage overflow requisitions while the internal team remained at the center of day-to-day hiring.
The model made sense, but the partnership wasn’t delivering. The RPO provider was filling roles at roughly half the rate of the internal team, time-to-fill had climbed above 60 days, and candidate quality was inconsistent. Submitted candidate summaries contained errors, and the internal team had little confidence in assigning requisitions to the provider because roles frequently went unfilled.
Frustrated with the results, the company took the program to RFP, and Advanced RPO won the engagement.
The company had invested real effort in its own hiring infrastructure, with an established process, an applicant tracking environment, and an internal team it wanted to keep at the center of hiring decisions. What it needed was a partner that could add recruiting scalability to that foundation and deliver consistently.
Solution: Advanced RPO embedded into the existing hiring process, providing flexible capacity and proactive sourcing.
We designed a recruitment on demand model built around that foundation. Rather than layering a parallel process on top of what the company had already built, we embedded into it, providing additional recruiting capacity within the company’s systems, processes, and timelines.
Our core team builds familiarity with the business and direct relationships with hiring managers, giving each search the context needed to succeed. When volumes increase, we scale quickly by bringing in additional support, then return to steady state as demand levels off. The company gets the reach of a much larger recruiting function when it needs it, without carrying that cost the rest of the year.
Where the previous provider had relied heavily on inbound applicant flow, we combined direct sourcing with a mix of programmatic and direct-buy advertising. That broadened the candidate pool considerably. From there, we focused on screening to identify the strongest candidates, allowing us to deliver slates hiring managers could trust. Together, the sourcing and screening approach addressed the candidate quality issues the company had experienced with its previous provider.
As we continued to deliver results and exceed expectations, the company came to us for help filling two hiring classes within its customer service and order fulfillment teams to meet business demands on a tight timeline. We quickly scaled the team to build strong pipelines for both classes and manage that volume of candidates through the entire process. When the approved pay rate was reduced late in the process, we navigated the resulting fallout and still hit both target dates.
Results: A recruiting partnership that reduced time-to-fill, strengthened candidate quality, and added the scalability needed to keep pace with hiring demand.
49 days
Time-to-fill, down from 60+ days
82%
Improved offer acceptance from 74% to 82% through more thorough candidate screening.
90%
90% of hires came from candidates identified through our sourcing strategy, significantly expanding reach beyond inbound applicants.
On target
Consistently met hiring targets for scheduled hiring classes.