JamieMinier, COO, NXT Thing RPOGone are the days where employers dictate the terms of hiring or even have fully stacked recruiting teams internally to find and attract top candidates. Instead, given the current economy and the excess supply of jobs, candidates can be more selective, and have changing demands and expectations of employers.
Addressing this on their own can seem overwhelming to organizations. And many talent teams find themselves needing to turn to a partner they can trust to outsource their recruiting function.
Recruitment process outsourcing, also known as RPO, offers a strategic mechanism to outsource part or all of the recruitment function to a skilled recruiting partner. Whether it’s in response to a critical need for staffing up a particular role quickly, like nurses, scientists, or engineers, or it is preparing for a major period of seasonal hiring, RPO has provided a lifeline to companies needing to find and connect with the right talent quickly.
Expert RPO providers, like NXTThing RPO, offer laser-focused recruitment services across verticals and across businesses of all sizes. The organization, part of Employ Inc., is known in the industry for its incredible ability to scale quickly and serve as a strategic extension for client recruitment or HR teams, providing expertise around the recruiting function.
Recently, we sat down with Jamie Minier, Chief Operating Officer at NXTThing RPO, to learn how her deep expertise in recruitment process outsourcing is helping organizations find talent — especially during the most difficult hiring environment in recent history. Learn from her insights based on our conversation with her.
Could you provide an overview of NXTThing RPO and your typical clients?
Yes, I am excited to share with you about NXTThing RPO. Our company is a leading recruitment process outsourcing partner that successfully blends technology and personal connection to find and hire the right talent for organizations.
We take a holistic approach to recruiting by complimenting a company’s existing efforts and then support them in tackling their biggest recruiting challenges. Whether a company needs help with part of the hiring process — or all of it — NXTThing can create a custom strategy to connect with the right talent, even in a very difficult hiring environment. We have more than 25 years of experience in the space, client retention rates of more than 99 percent, 100,000+ annual hires, and an unprecedented 24-hour deployment period.
We have the ability to support small- and medium-sized businesses all the way up to the enterprise level, with the majority of our clients in the enterprise space. We can fill everything from entry-level jobs and highly sophisticated professional roles to exempt positions and even executive-level roles . Not only do we solve the immediate hiring needs of companies today, we can also offer a more strategic lens for companies to rethink their recruiting strategy for the long-term.
What do you see as the most significant challenges companies are facing today in recruiting?
In the current market, companies are often unprepared to face the chaotic urgency that exists in recruiting. But we can fix that. Maybe they do not have the right process, or system, or technology they need to find talent. The pressurized situation has led some companies to try and entice candidates with sign-on-bonuses or other tactics, leading them to feel even more defeated in their efforts.
When the pandemic hit, organizations downsized their recruiting function or repurposed their teams, and so as hiring began to pick up again, they were unprepared for the challenges and difficulty in a candidate centric market. Now that businesses are bouncing back, they need to ramp up hiring efforts quickly. But they are unable to find talent fast enough and do not have the internal resources able to do the work. Ultimately, there is just an overwhelming need for RPO experts to come in and provide recruitment services that either supplement their current teams or support their reduced capability.
Please shed some light on how your service model helps clients address these pain points and the implementation strategy for NXTThing RPO?
Our approach to RPO is unique in the industry in that it is like a triangle — we believe it takes the right mix of technology, process, and recruiting as the three distinct sides of the triangle. It’s the combination of each of these three areas that makes NXTThing super successful and differentiates us from other providers.
We know how to direct recruit in this market, we have the tools and experts specifically suited for this. We have an excellent process that is fast, efficient, and creates a high-quality candidate experience. And we have technology that helps enable all of those things to provide creative, new, intriguing ways for both the candidate and the client organization to interact. So, it’s these three pieces of the triangle that make us different and enables us to help clients evolve.
Our process begins by uncovering the client’s needs for recruiting and hiring. We identify the type of role, pay, location, and other factors, including total number of hires needed. We also dig into their company culture, unique benefits, and competitors to get a true sense of the roles. Once we have this information, we move into direct recruiting — an area where we really shine. We are one of the strongest RPO providers in the market based on our ability to direct recruit talent for client organizations.
And really, this comes from our years of experience. We’ve been recruiting for 25 years. We know that we must pick up the phone and talk to somebody to find them. We know that we have to use technology and tools. And we know we have to be able to showcase why a client’s value proposition and culture is unique.
Through our sourcing, we find those people through a lot of really cool proprietary solutions that we have. And coming out of that, we get a really big pool of candidates interested in the job. Our internal teams then review resumes and interview them by phone to screen candidates and identify the most qualified talent.
For the administration portion, we help clients by providing all the tools they need to get candidates scheduled — whether through Zoom or for an onsite interview in just a couple days’ time. If other interviews are needed or assessments are required, we can help them do all the administrative work as well. Through the offer stage, we can extend verbal offers and written offers through the system. We can start background checks, drug screens and complete all of the onboarding, and in some cases, even payroll. It truly is full lifecycle recruiting.
What is another key differentiator of your recruitment services?
I’ve spoken already to our triangle approach, but another significant differentiator for us is that we have a very scalable team. If you need 500 people tomorrow, we have the ability to scale up our team and conduct 1,000 interviews. This is something we do regularly for our high-volume clients, for example, in the educational space.
Could you share some examples of how your services and offerings have elevated the clients’ recruiting function?
One of our large clients includes a top-rated bookstore company. We hire on average about 15,000 people a year for the organization, focusing primarily on seasonal activity in Fall and Spring. We support hiring for more than 1,500 locations across the U.S. and Canada, hiring around 4,000 people per week, especially at peak periods. NXTThing RPO handles everything from opening new requisitions to onboarding and even payroll, providing an end-to-end recruitment service.
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In the current market, companies are unprepared to face the chaotic urgency that exists in recruiting. But we can fix that
What does the future look like for NXTThing RPO in the next 12 to 18 months?
We remain resolute in aligning with the changing recruitment landscape. And we’re adapting to those ever-changing needs of our clients and what the market needs, like our new quick-start implementation. Looking ahead, one of the most exciting things for us is that we want to continue to be a partner and have a seat at the table for our clients in all of their talent acquisition strategies, including diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Despite all of the challenges right now, we are committed to supporting companies through our leading-edge approach to recruiting to meet companies where they are at for their most critical hiring needs.
