Resource Center

Recruitment Process Outsourcing—better known as RPO—has gained significant market momentum in recent years. Yet it has taken a while. Given that employers have been seeking help in their recruiting efforts for decades, it seems odd that the rise of RPO as a service solution has taken so long. Isn’t outsourcing of non-core functions a widely accepted business strategy? Isn’t recruiting one of the largest line items for many organizations and not a core function?

Today, however, organizations that consider outsourcing their recruiting efforts can pore over and compare tangible outcomes seen by those successful early adopters of RPO. But tread lightly. There have been a number of very public RPO failures where results have fallen woefully short of expectations, sending business leaders and the marketplace back into the boardroom to debate yet again the viability and sustainability of the solution. Can RPO be truly successful? If there are companies out there who are reaping the proposed benefits of outsourcing, what are they doing that others are not? The fact is there are common elements—let’s even call them tenets—that when followed, can greatly increase the effectiveness and ultimate outcomes of the RPO solution. Before we look at those tenets, however, it’s important to understand the history of RPO.