Replacing five recruitment agencies with one RPO partner for a UK financial-services firm

A UK financial-services firm was running its hiring through five different recruitment agencies, each with its own process, pricing and screening standard, and wanted one consistent partner instead. The firm turned to Alliance to consolidate its hiring into a single RPO partnership.

Hiring through five separate agencies carries its own pressures, and this brief had three in particular:

• Inconsistency: candidates arrived at different quality bars depending on which agency sourced them.
• Complexity: five separate relationships meant five sets of fees, timelines and reporting to manage.
• Compliance: compliance and reference-checking standards varied agency to agency.

Alliance consolidated the firm’s hiring into a single RPO partnership, replacing the five agencies with one point of accountability and one screening standard for every role, compliance included.

The same four-step process we use for every Alliance RPO programme applied consistently across all the roles previously split between agencies, and hiring volume could flex up or down without the firm re-tendering a new agency relationship each time.

• The firm moved from five agency relationships to one RPO partner with a single screening standard.
• Hiring costs fell within Alliance’s typical RPO range of up to 60% lower than the previous multi-agency spend.
• Compliance and reference-checking became consistent across every hire, not dependent on which agency sourced them.

This is a representative scenario, not a named case study. Client details are withheld to protect confidentiality.