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."[1]



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.[2] 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.



Benefits

RPO's promoters claim that the solution offers improvement in quality, cost, service and speed.



RPO providers claim that economies of scale enables them to offer recruitment processes at lower cost while economies of scope allow them to operate as high-quality, specialists.[citation needed]. Economies of scale and scope are said to arise from a larger staff of recruiters, databases of candidate resumes, and investment in recruitment tools and networks.



RPO solutions are also claimed to change fixed investment costs into variable costs that vary with fluctuation in recruitment activity. Companies may pay by transaction rather than by staff member, thus avoiding under-utilization or forcing costly layoffs of recruitment staff when activity is low.