Why You Should Outsource Your Graduate and Apprentice Recruitment

Early Careers recruitment is an important process. Welcoming the next generation of talent into the workforce and assessing who has the potential to thrive in different sectors is no small task. Especially when your organisation is looking to grow and evolve with every new hire. 

This is why outsourcing your recruitment process can have huge benefits. Recruiting graduates, apprentices, and placement students, involves a number of steps; and partnering with a specialist provider (like Amberjack) to share their expertise and shoulder some of the responsibility can be advantageous, especially for multiple hires, or for small recruiting teams under time pressure. 

The Benefits of Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) 

Recruitment Process Outsourcing has a number of benefits for organisations looking to make their hiring practices more effective and lessen the burden on their teams.  

Cost 

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of outsourcing your recruitment is the reduction in costs. Hiring new Early Talent comes with a host of needs with accompanying expenses. 

The Early Talent market is large and competitive. These factors require specific measures to ensure an effective hiring campaign. Are you targeting the right people in the right places? Are you targeting the same talent pools as your competitors? Are your attraction methods effective? There are many questions that need to be asked and answered. 

RPO can help remove the direct advertising and attraction strategy costs, by leaving it to an organisation such as Amberjack with a dedicated Attraction team. By outsourcing in these areas, you achieve greater value for money, utilising the expertise of a specialist team, reaching the right people in the right ways. 

RPO can also help with reducing costs by: 

• Filling vacancies and opportunities faster using automated processes and efficient teams, helping to reduce your overall time-to-hire to weeks rather than months 
• Removing unnecessary or inefficient practices 
• Offering innovative solutions, often faster than traditional practices 

Expertise 

Another advantage of using a specialist organisation such as Amberjack to recruit new graduates, is the expertise that we can offer. By partnering with Amberjack you directly engage with people who know what they’re doing. 

With access to Graduate and Apprentice market insights, we carry out market analysis. This allows us to predict trends and offer advice, subsequently allowing you to consistently evolve and improve your hiring practices, and ensure you’re ahead of the game. 

Furthermore, with a wide variety of clients and Early Talent partnerships at our fingertips, the data available to us means we can provide a level of analysis and reporting more comprehensive and valuable then what your inhouse teams may be able to achieve. 

At Amberjack, we pride ourselves on our expertise and the purposeful actions this can enable an organisation to take. In particular, we care about shifting the dial on diversity through the practices we deploy to ensure consistent and fair processes, allowing you to achieve a diverse mix of hires with potential. Our research, analysis, and specialist teams help us to make continuous progress in this area. 

Scalability 

The Early Talent market goes through peaks and troughs. Outsourcing enables you to match these fluctuating needs easily. Experts in this market are tuned into the patterns, we know when to scale up and down (and how to scale quickly and efficiently when necessary). 

Not only do we know the expected patterns but having the ability to scale quickly with a large team allows us to adapt to different situations with speed when unexpected events happen. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the Covid pandemic, and the rapid large-scale work we undertook without notice. 

For example, when our client, EY, needed to transform their in-person Assessment Centre to a digital experience due to Coronavirus, we helped them achieve this in 48 hours to avoid losing candidates. Request your free copy of the full EY case study here. 

Candidate Experience 

Candidate experience is more than just a tick box, and another key benefit of outsourcing and utilising a dedicated team is the commitment to providing an excellent candidate experience that we offer. Where in-house teams may struggle to offer consistency to every applicant due to time and workload pressures, teams like those at Amberjack can invest their time and expertise on a more individual basis. 

The clear communication offered by external teams carrying out RPO helps to reduce confusion for all parties. Candidates receive feedback and regular interaction from our team, having many knock-on effects; your applicants will rate your processes more highly, they are more likely to remain in your pipeline and be enthusiastic about the opportunity, they are less likely to renege or dropout. 

Quality Hires 

The improvement of candidate experience is a crucial part of achieving quality hires. Not only does the consistency offered to applicants lead to fewer dropouts, but the ability of outsourced teams to carry out broader, more effective, searches enables us to go beyond surface-level analysis and weed out unmotivated or unsuitable candidates. 

By outsourcing your recruitment to external teams, you gain deeper insight into your applicants. The ability of external teams to delve into candidates’ skills and deploy tools to assess them (such as Amberjack’s model for Potential) can help your organisation to move away from ineffective traditional processes like CV sifting and actually identify individuals with the ability to grow and succeed. 

Brand Impact 

Our flexible resourcing model means we achieve responsive and timely communications at every step of the process for your candidates, enforcing a positive brand message. By managing high volumes of applications and providing responsive communication, such as our coaching calls and feedback reports, your organisation’s brand and reputation as an employer is positively represented. 

The list goes on and on, but other benefits of RPO include: 

• Consistency: the process is run by one integrated team rather than across internal departments, we work as an extension to your teams. 
• Auditable: processes can be more easily reviewed, and our compliance with regulations helps ensure a fair and consistent quality process. 
• Resource drain: by outsourcing your recruitment you take a weight off your internal team’s shoulders and allow them to be more effective at other tasks. 

Ensuring Positive Experiences 

In summary, our delivery teams are here to ensure no matter what the outcome of a candidate’s assessment process, they are left with a positive experience of your brand at a formative stage in their careers. We take the responsibility of representing your brand and values extremely seriously, looking at continual improvement, new ways of working and introducing new innovations across our remit with technology enhancements, innovative assessment design, data analysis and recommendations, and above all, an exceptional candidate experience. 

Outsourcing your Early Talent recruitment never looked so good.