The past year has been a challenging year for Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) providers.  Unlike the HRO and BPO markets, organizations are slow to embrace end-to-end RPO for a variety of reasons.  For starters, hiring has slowed down dramatically for most companies and in some cases, stopped completely. As a result, many talent acquisition professionals have become fearful of losing their jobs and hesitant to outsource both the tactical and strategic aspects of talent acquisition. Organizations seem to want to keep some level of control.

One of our clients, a large global bank, told us that they have shut down all contingent recruiting, all executive recruiting, and tell job board sales people to call next year.   

This situation is compounded by the lack of standards available on RPO pricing and services. How can organizations know they are getting the most for their investment when they have little information to compare with the alternatives?  Several of our research members have asked us to benchmark their RPO contracts in the last few months because they are just not sure what they should be paying for such help.  Overall, RPO often gets a bad rap -despite the many benefits to organizations.

Spherion, a seasoned RPO provider, has responded to this challenge by re-branding their RPO solution to provide a clear message around their services. SourceRight Solutions addresses the talent acquisition needs of various job functions within an organization and remains separate from Spherion’s other services (Spherion Staffing, Technology Staffing and Executive Search). SourceRight Solution employs over 500 consultants that help organizations in the following areas:

• Enterprise-wide RPO: end-to-end RPO
• Selective RPO- includes services for individual business units
• Project-based RPO- addresses the short-term talent acquisition needs

While Spherion’s new RPO brand does not necessarily address the issue of standardizing RPO pricing and services, it does provide the customer with more clarity and transparency. Who wouldn't want to "source right?"  

We are conducting an in-depth RPO study this year... if your organization is currently outsourcing your recruitment or would like to learn more, please let us know and we will include you in our research.