RPO case study: high-volume hiring without sacrificing talent quality.
Global business services company hires 475 new customer service agents in just three weeks, at height of COVID-19 pandemic, with recruitment process outsourcing
| 3 min read |
Meeting high-volume hiring needs quickly
A global, tech-focused business services company helps its clients create exceptional brand engagement, future-proof their businesses and stay ahead of the competition. It specializes in supplying clients with customer support teams that are staffed by highly qualified, tech-savvy customer service agents who deliver outstanding customer experiences.
As the company welcomed a new, Fortune 500 tech client, it had to quickly hire customer service specialists across Canada to support its client’s new product launch. With an expected increase in consumer contacts, the client wanted to be careful not to compromise its focus on stellar customer engagement.
Ultimately, the company needed to hire 475 new employees in a short amount of time. However, it wasn’t able to dedicate internal resources to such a large-scale customer service hiring project. Adding complexity to this high-volume recruiting project, sourcing and recruitment needed to be completed during the height of COVID-19.
Facing the possibility of penalties from its new client — if the company couldn’t deliver the needed talent on time — it sought the help of an external talent solutions partner.
End-to-end resourcing support with RPO
Following the evaluation process, the business services company implemented recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), delivered by Randstad Sourceright, based on its extensive experience.
To meet the goal of hiring 475 new employees in just three weeks, the RPO assembled a team of talent advisors and sourcers to support the high-volume recruiting project from sourcing to providing onboarding support.
The company experienced early benefits from the additional recruiting technologies implemented with its RPO program. It was able to quickly set up an applicant tracking system (ATS) to power the process and programmatic advertising to distribute advertising spend to those websites that were performing the best. With the latest recruitment marketing tools and an email campaign to reach 80,000 potential candidates, the company could attract right-fit talent for its customer service positions.
Throughout the process, the company was in continual communication with the RPO team through daily metrics and updates on overall results, ensuring full transparency. The RPO team identified and interviewed more than 1,100 candidates in the three-week period, ramping up to more than 100 interviews per day.
Exceeding expectations with high-quality talent
Despite the demanding time frame and challenges brought on by the COVID-19 lockdowns, the company was able to meet its goal of hiring 475 customer service employees in just three weeks. Most importantly, it didn’t have to sacrifice talent quality to do so.
While some drop-off could be expected with such a large number of hires, only 6%–7% of new hires dropped off during the training process.
By working with an RPO provider, the global business services company was not only able to meet hiring demand to support its new client, but exceed the benchmarks put in place. The result was a successful high-volume hiring strategy in a challenging market.