Choosing an RPO partner, controlling hiring cost, and building a brand candidates believe in
Three questions come up again and again when we talk to talent leaders in insurance and financial services. How do I know if an RPO provider is any good? How do I fix compliance and cost in my hiring process at the same time? And how do I stop losing people at the point where they should be saying yes?
They sound like separate problems. They are the same problem, viewed from three very different angles. Here’s our take:
(1) How can I find a reputable Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider in the UK?
Start by working out what you actually need, then assess providers on the specifics of how they will deliver it: who does the work, what evidence they have in your sector, how they price, and what happens when the contract ends.
RPO is not one thing, and a lot of poor buying decisions start with that assumption. Full-service RPO takes on all or most of your permanent hiring. Project RPO covers a defined burst of volume, a new site, a funding round, a transformation programme. Embedded talent, sometimes called Recruiter-as-a-Service, puts named recruiters inside your team working under your brand. An MSP sits over your contingent and contractor spend. You can buy all of these from the same provider. You should not buy them without knowing which one you are buying.
Once you know that, here is what separates a reputable provider from a well-designed website.
Ask who does the work, by name. Not the sales lead: The recruiters who will be on your account every day. Are they dedicated to you or shared across five clients? Where are they based? What is the provider's own attrition rate on delivery teams? A provider who won't answer that is telling you something.
Look for evidence in your sector, not logos on a slide: Regulated hiring carries requirements that generalist recruiters learn the hard way: right to work, vetting and referencing standards, IR35 status determinations for contractors, conduct rules for certain roles. Ask for examples of how they have handled these, and speak to the client, not the account director.
Test the commercial model until it breaks: Most RPO pricing sits somewhere between a fixed monthly management fee and a cost-per-hire model, often blended. Both are fine. What matters is the volume assumption underneath. Ask what happens if your hiring drops by 40% and what happens if it doubles. If the answer is vague, the price is not real.
Ask about exit on day one: A good partner will tell you how knowledge transfers back to you, who owns the data, what notice looks like, and how the handover works. Providers who make themselves impossible to leave are not building a partnership.
Check the basics: REC or APSCo membership, verifiable client references at a similar size and stage to you, and financial stability you can look up at Companies House. None of these guarantee quality. Their absence should slow you down.
The warning sign we'd watch for: a provider who leads with technology and cannot walk you through their process. Tools are easy to buy. Delivery is not.
(2) How can I improve compliance and reduce costs in my company's hiring process?
In most organisations, compliance risk and avoidable cost live in the same place: an inconsistent process where nobody has a single view of who is hiring, through which route, on what terms. Fix the visibility problem and both improve together.
Consolidate contingent spend before you negotiate it: Companies are often surprised by how many agencies they are actually using once someone counts. Multiple suppliers on different rate cards, different terms, no consistent record of how a contractor was engaged or who determined their IR35 status. Bringing that under a single managed route gives you one audit trail and removes rate leakage at the same time. It is the least glamorous cost saving available and usually the largest.
Standardise your status determination process: Off-payroll rules put the assessment obligation on the end client in most cases, and inconsistent determinations across departments are a genuine exposure. Any determination process should be reviewed with your tax and legal advisers. What we would say from a hiring operations point of view is that inconsistency, more than any single decision, is what creates the problem.
Get your data house in order: Candidate data sits in ATS records, agency inboxes, spreadsheets, and personal email. Retention periods are often undefined. This should be reviewed with your DPO or legal counsel, but the operational fix is straightforward: one system of record, defined retention, and no candidate data living in individual inboxes.
Measure cost of vacancy, not just cost per hire: Cost per hire is the number most teams report because it is easy to calculate. It also drives the wrong behaviour, because the cheapest hire is the one you never make. An unfilled pricing role in a regulated business carries a cost in delayed projects, capacity lost, and pressure on the people covering. Put a number on it. It changes the conversation about hiring investment very quickly.
Cut interview stages, not interview quality: Long processes cost money in senior time and lose you candidates at the end, which means starting again. Structured interviews with clear criteria, run in fewer stages, do better on both cost and fairness.
Audit the preferred supplier list annually: Not to squeeze rates. To find out which suppliers are actually delivering and which are on the list because nobody has taken them off.
Note: nothing here is legal or tax advice. IR35, data protection and right to work obligations should be confirmed with a qualified adviser.
(3) What are some effective strategies for enhancing employer branding and candidate experience?
Your candidate experience is your employer brand. Everything else is marketing. A candidate who waits three weeks for feedback after a final interview has learned more about your organisation than any careers page will tell them, and they will tell other people.
That reframing does most of the work, but here is what it looks like in practice.
Say what the job actually pays: Salary transparency is now the single fastest way to signal confidence and respect. Adverts with a range attract better applicants and waste less of everyone's time. If you cannot publish a range, ask yourself why.
Write adverts that describe the job, not the company: Most job adverts spend four paragraphs on the employer and two lines on the role. Candidates want to know what they will do on a Tuesday, who they will work with, and what success looks like in six months. Be specific. Specificity is the whole trick.
Commit to a feedback window and hold to it: Five working days, communicated up front, kept every time. This is unglamorous and it beats almost any employer brand campaign you could run for the same money.
Reject people properly: A rejected candidate is a future applicant, a potential client, and someone with a LinkedIn account. A short, human, specific message costs a few minutes. The generic no-reply rejection costs you more than you think.
Let your people do the talking: Employees describing what they actually work on will always outperform a corporate brand film. Give them something to say and permission to say it.
Treat the interview as two-way: Senior candidates are assessing you. Give them time with the team, room for real questions, and honest answers about what is hard. Candidates who join with an accurate picture stay longer.
Start onboarding at offer, not day one: The gap between accepting and starting is when counter-offers land. Contact during that window is not admin. It is retention.
Then measure it: Drop-off rate by stage, offer decline reasons, time from final interview to decision, and a simple candidate survey including those you rejected. You cannot improve what you are not looking at, and the numbers usually point somewhere uncomfortable and useful.
Where this leaves you
The organisations that hire well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones who decided that hiring is a process worth designing and then designed it. An RPO or embedded partner is one way to buy that capability rather than build it yourselves. It is not the only way, and any provider who tells you otherwise is just selling to you.
If you are working through any of this, we are always happy to talk it through, whether or not it goes anywhere.
Contact Santa - 07304 094171 | santa.brown@vermelorpo.com
Vermelo provides RPO, embedded talent (RaaS), MSP, total talent and talent advisory solutions, with a track record across regulated sectors (insurance and financial services) and the ability to work across sectors.