RPO – Recruitment Processing Outsourcing

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer outsources or transfers all or part of its recruitment activities to an external service provider. To quote the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association, "Recruitment Process Outsourcing is when a provider acts as a company's internal recruitment function for a portion or all of its jobs. RPO providers manage the entire recruiting/hiring process from job profiling through the on-boarding of the new hire, including staff, technology, method and reporting.

A properly managed RPO will improve a company's time to hire, increase the quality of the candidate pool, provide verifiable metrics, reduce cost and improve governmental compliance. On the other hand, occasional recruitment support, for example temporary, contingency and executive search services is more analogous to out-tasking, co-sourcing or just sourcing. In this example the service provider is "a" source for certain types of recruitment activity. The biggest distinction between RPO and other types of staffing is Process.

In RPO the service provider assumes ownership of the process, while in other types of staffing the service provider is part of a process controlled by the organization buying their services. While temporary, contingency and executive search firms have provided staffing services for many decades, the concept of an employer outsourcing the management and ownership of part or all of their recruiting process wasn't first realized on a consistent basis until the 1970s in Silicon Valley's highly competitive high tech labor market.

Fast-growing high tech companies were hard-pressed to locate and hire the technical specialists they required, and so had little choice but to pay large fees to highly specialized external recruiters in order to staff their projects. Over time, companies began to examine how they might reduce the growing expenses of recruitment fees while still hiring hard-to-find technical specialists. Toward this end, companies began to examine the various steps in the recruiting process with an eye toward outsourcing only those portions that they had the greatest difficulty with and that added the greatest value to them.