RPO is BPO industry's new billion-dollar baby

NEW DELHI: High attrition rates may be a blot on the great Indian BPO success story, but this problem has helped spin off a niche industry - Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)- which is expected to grow by a billion dollar this fiscal to about 3.5 billion dollars.

The industry is set for rapid growth with a large number of companies in India and from abroad seeking to outsource their hiring-related jobs to third-party vendors here in order to save costs as well as time.

"India has been a hub of global outsourcing activities and RPO is the sunrise segment in this sector," hiring industry umbrella body Executive Recruiters Association's Executive Director B R Muralidharan told.

"In India, RPO is already a 2.5 billion dollar market and is expected to grow at a rate of 30 to 40 per cent during this financial year," he said.

This new buzzword is already enjoying taste of success with a number of corporate giants adopting the RPO model for their hiring needs inside and outside India. The hiring needs of British mobile major Vodafone is taken care of by RPO provider Alexander Mann Solutions, which also handled accounts of clients like Credit Suisse, HP, Prudential and Capgemini.

Closer home in India, the BPO arm of the country's third largest IT firm Wipro has outsourced its recruitment process to MeritTrac and aims to reduce its hiring costs by 15-20 percent by this move.

"Right hiring is the first and the most important step toward reducing attrition. Our objective is to move to a 'hands-free' recruiting process and this is the first step towards it," Wipro BPO CEO T K Kurien said.

Kanika Vaswani, Associate Partner at city-based RPO service provider Elixir Web Solutions said: "RPOs have been a well accepted tool especially in the mature markets. This allows an HR manager to focus on other core functions.

Elixir started its RPO business about six years back, catering mostly to the information technology clients. However, the market has expanded considerably and now its clients come from across the sectors, Vaswani said.

"We are now hiring in hundreds for many Fortune 1000 companies across sectors and 80 per cent of all the hirings we are doing are for US-based companies and the remaining 20 percent are for companies from Europe, Australia and Canada," she added.

Another Indian RPO service provider Blue Square Consultancy Services' CEO Madhu Khanna said India has managed to get a leverage in the business with its rich outsourcing experience.

"The future of RPO sector is bright with a chunk of the US workforce retiring in the next 5 to 10 years, thus creating a severe problem of talent acquisition.

"At present, the US-based recruiting and staffing agencies outsource their back-end operations to India on a revenue sharing basis and will continue to do so, but a significant difference would be seen going forward with a large number of vacancies coming on board," Khanna added.

Besides saving costs and reducing cycle time,  RPOs also help companies improve quality of hiring, the industry players believe. While companies had reservations initially about outsourcing their recruitment process -- one of the mostimportant human resource practice in an organisation - rising attrition rates and expanding sphere of overall HR functionshave made them accept and welcome borrowed hands to handle the hiring process.

All that a firm seeking to outsource its hiring functions needs to do is to provide an RPO with the details of job openings and the salary range in the offering.

From here the RPO takes over, going through the process of advertising for the position, to screening resumes, shortlisting candidates and finally going to the employers with the right kind of professionals. The openings can range from a fresher to a very senior employee of a company.
   
At the same time, the shift in the trend has been lapped up by the outsourcing service providers with an additional area of operation leading to a growing number of niche firms focused on HR outsourcing business.
   
RPOs have also come as a new lease of life for smaller companies with a workforce of around 100 to 150 people, who may not have a human resource department at all, Vaswani said.

Initially, the RPO business was limited to the IT sector and only recently non-IT companies have begun outsourcing their HR functions, domestic IT and outsourcing firm Birlasoft's global HR Vice President Narendra Puppala said.

However, the industry players are not worried about the BPO sector's current nemesis in form of high attrition rates denting the growth story.

This sector will not feel the heat of attrition so much as the BPOs as there, the people were only able to use their hand and feet, wherein in this process they get the satisfaction of using their minds as well, Puppala said.