Recruitment Process Outsourcing Market Remains Hot, Posting 17 Percent Growth Rate in 2015 | Press Release
New deal activity tops 18 percent growth as service providers from all backgrounds, diverse regions taste success in highly competitive, fragmented RPO market.
The global Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) market continued to remain one of the fastest growing single-process HRO markets. Buoyed by a resurgence of growth in the North American market, RPO posted a strong growth rate of 17 percent in 2015 over 2014 and touched the US$2.4 billion mark. A majority of the global growth is attributed to new deal activity, which grew at a rate of more than 18 percent year on year.
From a regional perspective, the United States, United Kingdom and Australia are the relatively more mature and bigger RPO markets, and they account for a large chunk of the global deal activity. Nonetheless, many countries in different regions across the world are emerging as strong RPO markets on their own, particularly in Latin America, Continental Europe and Asia Pacific.
“Across the globe, the key challenge in today’s recruitment landscape is the need to find and engage the required talent, especially for high-skilled roles, and buyers are expecting greater proactiveness and innovation from service providers in that regard,” said Arkadev Basak, practice director, Business Process Services, at Everest Group. “Providers are responding to this opportunity by developing niche areas of expertise, adding talent advisory capabilities, and improving their internal efficiencies, by leveraging technology, providing targeted training, and addressing division of labor fundamentals.”
Over 40 percent of RPO deals are bundled with a technology capability. In particular, many service providers are making dedicated investments in developing bundled RPO offerings that include advanced analytic services.
“Service providers are using technology as a productivity lever as well,” adds Ranjan. “For example, we are beginning to see providers adopting Robotic Process Automation to improve efficiency and save on costs, and we expect RPA adoption to rise rapidly in the future.”
These and other research findings are explored in a recently published Everest Group report: Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) Annual Report 2016 – Opportunities Abound in a Buoyant Market.
This report provides comprehensive coverage of the RPO market across dimensions such as market overview, key business drivers, buyer adoption trends, solution and transaction trends, emerging themes and areas of investment, and service provider landscape.
Other key findings in the report:
- Single-country RPO accounts for a majority of the deal activity. Interest in Multi-Country RPO (MCRPO) engagements is high; however, the size and scope of such deals is witnessing a downward trend. In fact, very few incidents of global mega-sized deals were witnessed of late.
- Emerging RPO markets, such as India, China, Poland, and Colombia, which were mostly included as part of multi-country deals earlier, are now increasingly witnessing greater single-country deal activity, characterizing the growing maturity of RPO in these markets
- While cost reduction is an important RPO driver, operational scalability and flexibility is what most buyers, especially the large ones, seek from an RPO engagement.
- With growing maturity of the RPO market, inclusion of value-added services, such as employer branding, talent communities, workforce planning, etc., has almost become table-stakes in RPO, especially among second- and third-generation buyers
- Service providers are increasingly offering separate, more targeted offerings around niche areas such as veterans, diversity hiring and outplacement. Not only does this trend help address buyer needs better, it also provides differentiation for the service provider
- Almost all major RPO service providers are investing in developing talent advisory capabilities. Such services bulk up the value proposition of existing RPO offerings, especially among the first-time buyers, and can also act as potential door openers for new business opportunities
The RPO market continues to remain intensely competitive and fragmented. Providers from all backgrounds (including staffing, broader BPO, and pure-play RPO) have tasted success in this fast-growing market
