Hiring glossary
What is RPO (recruitment process outsourcing)?
Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is an arrangement in which an employer hands all or part of its recruitment process to an external provider, which runs it on the employer’s behalf, usually under the employer’s brand and over a multi-month or multi-year contract.
The difference from a recruitment agency is ownership of the process. An agency fills individual vacancies and is usually paid per hire. An RPO provider takes responsibility for the process itself: it may supply recruiters, sourcers and coordinators, run the applicant tracking system, manage job advertising and employer branding, screen and assess candidates, schedule interviews and report on hiring metrics, often with its staff working as an extension of the in-house team.
RPO comes in several models. End-to-end (or enterprise) RPO covers all or most hiring across the organisation. Project RPO covers a defined hiring push, such as staffing a new site or a product launch. Selective or modular RPO outsources one part of the process, such as sourcing or screening, or one category of roles, such as high-volume or technical hiring. Pricing commonly combines a management fee with fees per hire, though structures vary by provider.
Employers use RPO to scale hiring up or down without adding permanent headcount in the recruiting team, to bring in recruitment expertise and technology they lack, and to make hiring more consistent across business units. The risks are loss of internal knowledge, a provider whose incentives favour volume over quality, and a candidate experience that drifts from the employer’s standards.
Before signing, agree the service levels (time to fill, quality of hire, candidate satisfaction, diversity of shortlists), who owns the candidate data and the employer brand, how hiring managers will work with the provider’s recruiters, and how the process and data come back in-house if the contract ends.
Also called: recruitment process outsourcing, recruiting process outsourcing, outsourced recruitment.
Example
A retailer opening 20 new stores in a year signs a 12-month project RPO. The provider supplies four recruiters and a coordinator, runs high-volume screening and assessment for store roles under the retailer’s brand, and reports weekly on time to fill and first-90-day retention.
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