Part 1 of this article ended with the following position;

“So I think that 2011 will look a lot like 1999, when RPO firms were called “project recruitment” or “staff augmentation” firms. We seem have come full circle. In the end, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Stay tuned for part 2 of this series….”

Into 2011 – RPO

The above stated, I would offer that we will in fact look more like 1999, but I think that is a very good thing, and here are some reasons why on both (the 1999 and the good):

RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing). Seems fairly easy to make an educated guess as to what this really means, but think again.

I myself own an “RPO” firm (or so I thought). I have attended several national and international RPO professional symposiums over the last five years. Typically these gatherings include RPO firm executives, as well as industry gurus, and more times than not, one of the breakout sessions at these meetings revolves around a panel of experts discussing what their definition of RPO really is.

Interestingly enough, and coincidentally, each individual always seems to have a slightly different take on what “RPO” really means. They are a group of peers, all in leadership positions within the “RPO” business, yet their definition and perspective of what this actually means and what services should be and are delivered under this type of model vary widely.

RPO EARLY ROOTS

Contrary to the opinion of some, RPO did not just appear as a business model out of thin air over the last five years. The RPO model’s precursor really started in the early to mid 1990’s. The semantics of those days did not include the RPO vernacular, but was described as “Project Staffing”, or “Staff Augmentation”, or even “Stampede Recruiting”. Many firms were created in the “RPO” style in the 1990’s based on the need of Technology companies to grow exponentially on a “real time basis”. Technology companies at that time, and still today, often need to “reactively” hire very large numbers of people to fulfill the demand of a newly produced technology product or service (i.e. think Google or Apple). It was, and is, extremely important to get new technology products to market as quickly as possible, and to do that, you needed increasingly large numbers of developers, sales staff and marketing staff. Because of the large increase in headcount in those areas, it became vital to hire large numbers of infrastructure roles to support the larger organization (i.e. HR, Finance, Procurement, etc.)