Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) History

In February 2009 the Human Resources Outsourcing Association (HROA) specified and approved a group associated with them the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Alliance. Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is basically a type of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) where the management of the firm gives the responsibility of the recruitment process for that organization to a third party service provider. The Recruitment Process Outsourcing provider can himself choose the methods to carry out the recruitment process which they feel is convenient for them, which may be that the vendor may adhere to his own methodologies or the company’s way of carrying out the entire recruitment process.

The Recruitment Process Outsourcing is a lot different from the other service providers such as contingency search firms, staffing agencies and retained search providers in dealing with entire recruitment because the RPO provider is entirely responsible for the methods utilized, design ownership, conducting the entire recruitment process and the outcomes of the process.

Service Providers other than the RPO providers like executive and contingency search forms were providing the firms with recruitment services for many years until the employers started realizing the consistency of the concept on relying upon an outsource to deal with the entire or part of the recruiting process. This was not until the 1970’s when there was a high-level competition in the technical labor market.

Expanding High Tech Firms were usually distressed upon the acquisition of high tech expertise and specialists and were left with other choice except to hire highly paid external recruiting specialists for the completion of their hiring staff projects.

With the passage of time many companies starting analyzing how they can reduce their expenses while still be able to hire the high tech specialists for their firm and while doing this they started to acknowledge the steps of the recruiting process along with focusing on the areas of great difficulties faced by their company. This then eventually added great value to the business.

At first, the job of the RPO programs was just to conduct the recruitment process, shortlist the eligible candidates and inform the employers it and the acquisitions are then carried out by the company.

As time passed, the idea of outsourcing kept gaining more and more favor among establishments’ HR managements because they not only helped in reducing the expenses and overhead cost but also helped in bringing quality and completion in the labor market. Since then until the early 2000’s, among many companies, RPO programs were taken into great consideration to fulfill their recruitment needs.