How To Avoid The Main Pitfall of RPO

Outsourcing recruitment process brings about many benefits to companies. Saving time, reducing cost per hire, and higher quality candidates are some of the benefits. On the other hand, outsourcing firms may not grasp the client company’s culture and values thoroughly. This often results in the company hiring non-compliant candidates, toxic conflicts, dismissal, and time and money loss eventually. The same should be expected from the RPO firms which do not look for culture and value compliance in candidates during the hiring process.

Culture and value gap between candidates and companies mostly create conflict between such an employee and others. In some cases, such employees have conflicts with their managers, because  their decisions seem unacceptable according to the employees’ culture. 

For example, some companies may want their experienced employees to help or mentor juniors, or some clients briefly, sometimes. A pragmatism focused employee may expect extra money for such help, while the company thinks such interventions within the context of job description and showing good intentions. Probably, meaningless conflicts during the daily routine of the employee would occur as a reflection of its discomfort based on that approach gap. 

For this example, the conflicts occur because of the conflict between the employee’s core value, “pragmatism”, with the company’s core value, “contribution”. If you can not find a real reason for such discomfort in communication with an employee, the real reason may lay in the value conflict.

Finding the correct fitting candidates for companies in terms of culture and core values needs a special focus. Following suggestions may help RPO firms for building a thorough procedure to catch a good focus on value alignment.

* A company’s listed core values may not always reflect the real core values of that company. Because, its core values are a mix of the ones from all the managers and employees. Therefore, real values of that company should be identified first.

* After a candidate’s core values are identified, they should be compared with the values of the company to find out if the candidate is a good fit, or not.

* Cultural fit is as important as value fit. For that, the culture of the company should be identified as well.

* Cultural intelligence of an employee may substitute the culture fit of that employee. So, a candidate with enough cultural intelligence may be a good candidate even though there is a culture gap.