Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a process carried out by a company in order to attain talent, speed up and improve talent management programs by depending upon a third party, a source outside the company who partly or completely help them out in the firm’s recruitment session.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing has become increasingly efficient and helpful to many firms in these recent years to carry out the talent attainment and management activities. It also helps the firm bring lower costs to their expenses, high level of quality to their service and speed in the recruitment process.

In General terms, Recruitment Process Outsourcing is referred to as another form outsourcing related to processes of the Human Resources known as the Human Resources Outsourcing (HRO), but basically, RPO differs from HRO’s use of ways of carrying out the recruitment process under the circumstances of having the entire responsibility, authority and ownership of the entire recruitment process by the client with help of the executive search firms, staffing agencies and external headhunters.

However, under RPO the seller or the recruiter who is hired by the firm for the recruitment process has the authority and ownership both of the entire recruitment process and he is responsible for the result at the end of the process whether it is good or bad.

The staffing agencies and executive search firms came into existence during the time of Great Depression which wasn’t until the 1970’s that a company named Silicon Valley came up with the concept of start the ownership of such outsource recruitment processes and to help bring the cost down of various firms accompanied by the use of the external headhunters in competitive labor markets. Since then many companies started to realize and examine the steps of the recruitments process and started to conduct the outsource methods on the stages which seemed difficult for them and then successfully started generating potential and suitable candidates as per the firm’s requirement.

After the long awaited arrival of HRO sellers in the 1980s and 1990s, the introduction to the concept and method of RPO started gaining favor among the human resource consultants and was considered as a better recruitment process by the early 2000s.

At present day Recruiting Process Outsource Association (RPOA) has been developed in order to provide the entire recruitment process required by a firm from scheduling interviews, to short listings of the capable candidates, to the hiring which has become very much convenient for many firms around the world.