Getting Started With Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)

As an HR or Procurement leader in today’s business environment, you are being asked for ideas on how to more strategically manage the talent in your organization. Whether you work in a mid-cap company where the right professional-level talent to grow multi-nationally is not in place, or a large-cap company whose fixed recruiting costs have saddled the business with unnecessary overhead, the pressure to optimize your talent supply chain is immense. So, you begin to wonder whether outsourcing recruitment to an outside company is a potential solution. This section of our website is here to help you makes sense of the idea.

A Definition of Recruitment Process Outsourcing

First, you should understand the industry standard definition of RPO:

“Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer transfers all or part of its recruitment processes to an external service provider. An RPO provider can provide its own or may assume the company's staff, technology, methodologies and reporting. In all cases, RPO differs greatly from providers such as staffing companies and contingent/retained search providers in that it assumes ownership of the design and management of the recruitment process and the responsibility of results.”-HROA

As you can see, there is a continuum of scope and scale to any engagement. Using Hudson RPO, you get a firm that has experience delivering solutions across the range of possibilities, from full RPO, to Hybrid programs, and even Project Recruitment. Each of these represents a different amount of cost, risk, and potential reward for your business.

Ask Questions, Get Answers

Here are some articles that more fully explore how to evaluate whether RPO is right for your business.

8 Great Procurement Questions for RPO

Procurement managers often must weigh the pros and cons of outsourcing elements of their business to outside providers. Here are some key considerations.

3 Ways Recruitment Process Outsourcing Reduces Cost

If your mandate is to reduce operational costs for your organization, here are some ways that RPO may address that need.

The Difference Between RPO and other Types of Staffing

An article by Michael Beygelman in HRO Today that more fully explores the definition of RPO