I have been involved with RPO companies large and small in various capacities over the years. I can say with the confidence of an insider that in the main, they or no less dysfunctional, inept, devoid of imagination and generally wattless than the clients who they purport to transcend.

No two employers are alike. They are all different by virtue of their size, orientation, positioning, culture, experience, leadership, workforce and yada-yada-yada.

So, how can a process that systematizes something as nuanced, complex and involved  as recruiting passive, semi-passive, semi-active, active, and/or hyper-active candidates — who, I might add, could match any number of psychographic constructs, fit any number of demographic profiles and/or be in any number of geographic areas — be farmed out to an industry that is one slice short of a loaf of bread?

Surely the only RPOs worth looking at are the ones that have a process for identifying the underlying problem that is being outsourced and who recognize the problem could be an issue internally as well as within the clients’ operation.

Provided an RPO can be that artful, call a spade a spade on economies of scale and demonstrate how they’ve tackled their own “problems” — God knows there are some marginal recruiters, systems and practices out there — then who are we kidding?

I don’t have any firsthand experience of an RPO that is that open to that degree of self-examination and equally transparent about what they find. Do you? Nah, what are we, nuts?