RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) is when a company hands all or part of its hiring to an external provider that runs the recruitment process end to end — sourcing, screening, scheduling, and sometimes onboarding — often embedded as an extension of your team. Unlike a staffing agency that places individual candidates, RPO owns the process and is measured on hiring outcomes.
An RPO provider takes over a defined slice of your recruiting — a department, a region, or your entire talent function — and runs it using their recruiters, technology, and process. They typically work to agreed metrics such as time-to-fill, quality of hire, and cost per hire, and report against them. The model can be ongoing (managing all hiring) or project-based (for a hiring surge), and the recruiters often operate under your employer brand.
A staffing agency places individual candidates for a fee per hire and owns none of your process. In-house recruiting keeps everything internal but needs headcount and tooling. RPO sits between them: it outsources the process itself, giving you agency-like scalability with more consistency and ownership of outcomes than one-off placements provide. It suits companies that hire continuously and want a managed, measurable function.
RPO fits high-volume or fast-scaling hiring, talent functions that are hard to staff internally, or employers who want predictable cost and quality without building a large in-house team. For occasional or senior one-off hires, a staffing agency or executive search is usually a better fit than a full RPO engagement.
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