As enterprises struggled to hire talent in the wake of the Great Resignation, recruitment process outsourcing providers helped augment talent acquisition activities for clients of all sizes and across industries.

Industrial and IT roles now account for the largest occupational skill category in terms of the number of reported hires. Aside from industrial roles, the RPO market predominantly serves professional roles, with IT, healthcare and finance and accounting representing nearly 50% of hires.

Experienced hires make up the largest share of the market at 46%, although many providers are delivering all hiring types from apprenticeship campaigns to executive search. Often, a provider will be engaged to deliver one hiring type in the first instance and will take on further types as the RPO relationship develops.

RPO market share by occupational skill category and hiring type (% share of reported hires)

SIA’s complementary Lexicon of Contignent Workforce Terms defines RPO as:

“A service segment of the process outsourcing industry (see definition), RPO is the partial or full outsourcing of the internal recruitment function to a third-party specialist provider, which serves to provide the necessary skills, activities, tools, technologies, related recruitment supply chain partners and process methodologies to assume the role of the client’s recruiting department by owning and managing its recruitment process and related recruitment supply chain partner relationships.”

Source: RPO Global Landscape 2022

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