CWS 3.0: November 19, 2014

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Process management is RPO, stay focused

There are numerous definitions of recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) in the marketplace and the summary of all of these seems to be that RPO is everything any provider claims it is. As a consequence, it is being defined in many various ways by the buyer community too. These far-ranging definitions lead to a confusing, poorly defined marketplace in terms of the core solution value delivered; who the legitimate providers are; the appropriate pricing for a RPO solution; and what the correct adoption and growth rates of RPO are.

So how should the term be defined? And what minimum solution value should it include?

Defining RPO. An RPO solution should require the provider actually manages a critical scope of the client’s recruitment process. As the principal manager of the process, an RPO provider should be responsible for a recruitment result, most conventionally a hire, and paid for achieving that defined result in accordance to its capability of managing the performance of the recruiting process. This is business process outsourcing with a minimum value of process management risk to drive a planned, targeted result.

Other added-value solution components can and should be transformation/re-engineering of the process and ongoing continuous improvement of one’s talent acquisition methodology/strategy. RPO providers should bring an advanced level of recruitment management knowledge and capability to this process management solution. In typical business process outsourcing, a solution will be highly integrated with a management technology to enhance/optimize the operating capability of the outsourcing provider’s solution. RPO solutions should also include best practice knowledge leveraged from across multiple client engagements. The provider needs to play the role as recruiting expert/knowledge leader!

RPO in its truest process management form is not just candidate sourcing or interview scheduling management or just an onboarding service or even an arbitrary combination of these. One can try to argue that a selective recruitment service that just focuses on “candidate sourcing” is the outsourcing of a recruitment function element. Then we should call it the “candidate sourcing outsourcing” marketplace with its discreet value proposition and targeted transformation/results, not RPO. The provider in this recruitment service solution is not responsible for making a hire, only making a valued contribution to the hiring process.

Process management. The core point here is RPO is the transfer of process management responsibility to an outside provider with a scope of authority/exclusive empowerment to deliver specific hires in a defined timeframe. Some client organizational dependencies will limit the scope of the process being managed, but beyond that, the provider is contractually, and in some cases financially, responsible to deliver a RPO recruitment results: a targeted hire.

Recruitment services such as candidate screening, interview scheduling management and onboarding support are important, discreet talent acquisition support services. If one uses a proper definition of these services, one could find them being a significant portion of what is probably being called as RPO in today’s marketplace. If this is true, then the RPO market is not as big as currently defined by providers and buyers, and we may have a clouded view of what is really driving this marketplace.

More importantly, buyers that want to secure recruitment process management or just discreet recruitment support services may be engaging providers that are not optimized to deliver one or the other because that is not their key business focus. Many buyers want and need scaling support in terms of candidate sourcing and recruitment process administration, but reluctant to explore some providers’ capabilities when they are poorly describe as “RPO solutions.” That is because they simply do not want to outsource the management of their recruiting function, they just need some resource/expertise support while continuing to own the management of their recruiting process internally.

The actual and practical meaning of RPO has been seriously diluted over the last decade or so by aggressive recruiting provider marketers and uninformed buyers. This has caused unnecessary engagement failures in the marketplace and prevented buyers engaging service providers who are operationally optimized for the recruitment services/solutions they actually require.