Key Findings & Highlights:

NelsonHall’s market analysis of the RPO services market consists of 129 pages. The report focuses on developments made over 2020 and strategy for 2021.

The impact of COVID-19 will endure into 2021. However, for 2020, the market will shrink by 8.3% overall. Longer-term, the global RPO market will grow at 4.0% per annum, to reach ~$7.4bn in 2024.

Key PESTLE factors impacting the RPO space in 2020, and for the foreseeable future, include economic (worsening global skills shortage and declining revenues/reduced budgetary spend due to COVID-19). Also, social (a digitally native workforce, remote workers), technological (the rapid pivot to embrace technology for remote working, ongoing personalization/consumerization of tech), and environmental (the health pandemic, reduction in environmental pollution).

RPO solutions are modular in structure, giving organizations the flexibility to blend models, services, technology, and delivery, to meet their changing needs. 2020 saw further flexibility introduced as vendors pivoted to meet the work-life changes brought about by COVID-19: adapting existing services and introducing new services to support their clients.

There is continued focus on delivering a great candidate experience (with RPO vendors being more joined up on the relationship between services, technology, and delivery). Technologies/tools (with time-saving/ volume handling automation) offering something unique to enhance the candidate experience have appeared during 2020, with robust roadmaps continuing for 2021. An influx of job-seekers to the market (due to the COVID-19 lockdown) accentuates the importance of delivering a good candidate experience using technology (speed of the process, candidate communications). It should not be used as an excuse for organizations to provide a poor TA service (as bad reputations for service linger long, thanks to social media).

Tech and tools focus on high-volume mobile platforms, with increased automation requiring minimal human touch and improving speed-to-hire. Also, AI algorithms for CV parsing and candidate matching, the user experience, appification, more data points, and predictive analytics. Voice-activated search and apply is potentially game-changing for TA.

The emerging RPO patterns seen before 2020 were likely to take ten years to embed themselves. COVID-19 changed the situation, with RPO deals likely to see the most change in 2021-2022. Vendors will have to establish their comfort zones in this new era, but the outlook offers RPO vendors much opportunity to expand their offerings.