How to Choose a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) for Your Startup

As a startup, you’ll often find yourself in the position of needing to hire a large number of employees quickly. Not only do you need to fill those initial positions quickly in order to keep your startup moving smoothly, you’ll find that as your business grows, you’ll often need to fill open jobs in order to keep up with customer demand. By working with a great recruitment process outsourcing firm (RPO), you’ll find yourself in a better position to fill those open positions and keep up with the demands of your customers.

Finding a Field Fit

As a technical startup, you’ll often find yourself needing individuals with a specific set of skills. Often, those are summed up based on specific certifications or degrees — but that doesn’t mean that the perfect candidate has to have the exact certification or degree you’ve specified. A great RPO will specialize in your field and have experience working with those types of candidates. They’ll be able to:

• Take a look at a candidate’s resume and determine whether their skills are a good fit for your open position
• Conduct a basic evaluation of a candidate’s skills to ensure that they really have the ability to take on the responsibilities of your open position
• Work with candidates in order to describe the skills you need them to have, in case a candidate wants to work with your business in the future

A good RPO will be able to take a wide pool of candidates and narrow it down to the ones who will genuinely be a good fit for your company. Not only will they be able to look for the specific skills you’re asking for, they’ll have the experience to come at it from more than one direction in order to adequately assess each candidate and bring you the ones who are most likely to work for your company.

The Financial Fit

As a startup, your budget is always tight. You can’t afford to spend a fortune on each candidate you hire — and many traditional RPOs will leave you struggling to figure out how to handle that bill. You need a recruitment company that offers options. Our company, for example, provides a monthly model that allows you to pay just $500 per month and $5000 per candidate — a significantly lower rate than many recruitment agencies, which will require you to pay a large percentage per candidate.

The Culture Fit

With a startup, you have the unique opportunity to build your company culture from the ground up — and that’s something you don’t want to compromise! Your company culture will help shape your company, determining the individuals who are most likely to work for you in the future. Not only that, it can help make a great working environment where your employees genuinely enjoy coming each day. When you work with a quality RPO, they should go beyond the candidate’s job skills to learn more about them. You’re looking for a personality fit as well as a skills fit, and your RPO should be able to include many of those factors as part of their search in order to get a better fit who is more likely to stay with your company long-term.

Working with a great RPO will help ensure that you get the candidates who are most qualified to fill the open positions within your company. You don’t just want candidates who have been thrown at the position. You want the ones who will be a great fit and, ideally, stay with your company through these startup days until you reach your goals. By hiring a great RPO, you’ll find that it’s easier to meet those goals and more effectively move candidates into the open positions within your business.

Originally published at www.expansion-pack.com.