RPO delivers global talent — faster.

RPO is a talent acquisition solution where an organization partners with an outsourcing and consulting provider like KellyOCG to manage all or part of its recruitment process. Unlike traditional staffing, RPO is a strategic partnership designed to build hiring capability, not just fill jobs. An RPO provider acts as an extension of your internal team, delivering services like sourcing, screening, interviewing, and onboarding candidates. This approach helps improve hiring quality and speed, optimize costs, and support business growth. Clients gain faster time-to-fill, access to recruiting best practices, scalable solutions tailored to changing business needs, and measurable business outcomes.

While staffing agencies focus on filling individual roles, RPO providers manage and optimize your entire recruitment process — bringing expertise, technology, and market intelligence to build a long-term hiring engine. The difference that matters most is what you are left with. An agency fills a named vacancy for a fee and moves on. RPO takes on the hiring process itself: sourcing, screening, interviewing, and offer management, running as a scalable, self-sustaining program rather than a series of transactions.

In RPO, candidates always interact with your employer brand, not the RPO provider’s. The RPO team recruits and communicates under your company’s name, messaging, and values, ensuring a seamless candidate experience that reflects your culture. This reinforces your brand presence and keeps all candidate touchpoints consistent.

Understanding which RPO model suits your needs depends on how much of the hiring you want to hand over, and for how long. Enterprise RPO suits companies hiring at scale that want the whole recruitment function run for them. Modular RPO suits a team that works well but needs support in one place, whether that’s a function, a skill area, or a country — and includes Project RPO, which covers hiring with a start and end date. Hybrid RPO splits the work between your team and ours. Recruiter on Demand adds recruiters or other specialized TA resources to your team without changing how you work. Most clients keep the final hiring decision and the hiring manager relationship; some hand over everything up to the last interview. Where that line falls is agreed when the program is designed, not fixed in advance.

The ideal RPO customer is a company facing business challenges that can’t be solved by recruiting alone — think rapid growth, expansions, new facilities, mergers, high turnover, transformation, or trouble scaling an internal team. Companies with significant hiring volume, long time-to-fill metrics, poor candidate quality, a need for more recruiters or TA resources, or heavy agency reliance often turn to RPO when they want to transform talent acquisition and drive real operational improvement.

RPO is usually priced in one of three ways: a fee per hire, a monthly fee for the recruiters working on your account, and/or a management fee covering the program as a whole. Which one fits depends on how predictable your hiring is. What moves the price is scale and scope: how many hires, how many countries and functions, how difficult the roles are to fill, and how much of the process transfers to us. We will give you a cost proposal before anything is agreed. 

With six global delivery hubs across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC, KellyOCG provides seamless, “follow-the-sun” coverage, meaning recruiting doesn’t stop, regardless of location or time zone. We operate in 70+ countries with a team that speaks 30+ languages. Wherever you work today or want to work tomorrow, we have you covered.

KellyOCG supports 100,000+ hires annually in 70+ countries, has been recognized by industry analysts like Everest Group, maintains a 98% client retention rate, and delivers proven results for complex permanent hiring needs.

Sevenstep was created as part of Motion Recruitment Partners (MRP), based on the seven steps of recruiting used to operate all client programs: setup, source, screen, schedule, feedback, offer, and hire. It became part of the Kelly portfolio following the 2024 acquisition of MRP, which brought its industry-leading RPO expertise and operational rigor to the KellyOCG team. This strategic partnership enhanced KellyOCG’s ability to deliver scalable, high-quality recruitment solutions worldwide. Sevenstep’s proven governance, advanced technology, and global delivery capabilities now strengthen our talent acquisition offerings. As a result, clients benefit from even greater agility, innovation, and measurable hiring outcomes.