RPO services for companies hiring too much to pay per placement
Above about twenty hires a month, per-placement fees stop making sense and start distorting behaviour. RPO puts a dedicated recruitment team on your side of the table — your brand, your ATS, your interview process, your service levels — for a monthly fee that does not spike when you have a good hiring quarter.
Role, band and location. We aim to send a shortlist plan within one working day.
An embedded team, not a vendor queue
RPO recruiters sit in your hiring meetings, use your systems, speak in your name and are measured on your funnel — the difference from agency work is ownership.
- ✓Named recruiters and a sourcing pod, sized to your monthly hiring plan
- ✓Work inside your ATS with your requisition and approval flow
- ✓Employer brand: job posts, careers content, candidate communication
- ✓Funnel management from sourcing through offer and joining
- ✓Interview scheduling, panel coordination and feedback chasing
- ✓Weekly funnel review: source mix, conversion, drop-off, time to offer
- ✓Optional on-site presence at plant or campus during ramp periods
Per-hire fees make your worst hiring months your most expensive
When hiring volume rises, agency spend rises with it, and the quality of attention falls because every vendor is optimising for the easiest fill.
Duplicate submissions, ownership arguments, no visibility on source quality, and your own team spending its week coordinating vendors instead of hiring.
Plus interview slots wasted on poorly screened candidates, plus offer drop-offs that nobody analyses because no single party owns the funnel end to end.
Named recruiters inside your process, one funnel, one dashboard, service levels on time-to-shortlist and offer conversion — and a cost per hire that falls as volume rises.
Start the search →
Models, service levels, transition
RPO is priced as a monthly fee for the dedicated team, with an optional per-hire variable on top for volume beyond plan. Your actual fee structure is agreed in your contract. The slider converts monthly hires into an illustrative all-in cost at an assumed effective ₹34,000 per hire — the team fee divided by hires — before GST; it is an assumption for comparison, not our rate.
Not every company needs full-cycle RPO on day one.
How RPO is priced in India: four models compared
RPO proposals look alike until you read how the fee moves when your hiring volume moves. These are the four structures you will be offered, and what each one rewards.
| Model | How the fee works | What it rewards | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Management fee | A fixed monthly fee for a dedicated team sized to your hiring plan | Steady capacity and process quality | Predictable, continuous hiring across the year |
| Cost per hire | A fixed fee for each hire who joins | Volume — watch for quality slipping | Uneven volumes where you only want to pay for outcomes |
| Hybrid | A lower monthly fee plus a smaller per-hire fee | Both capacity and outcomes | Most mid-size programmes; the common compromise |
| Project RPO | A fixed fee for a defined ramp over a fixed term | Hitting a dated target | A new plant, site, BPO floor or product launch |
GST at 18% applies on RPO fees. Job-board licences, assessment tools and advertising are usually passed through at cost — ask for them as separate lines. For one-off per-placement hiring, see permanent staffing.
Is RPO cheaper than agencies for you? The three numbers to add up
Compare like with like: everything you spend on hiring today against the full RPO proposal, over the same twelve months and the same hiring plan.
1. Agency fees today
Hires per month × average annual CTC × average placement fee. For example, at 25 hires a month, an average CTC of ₹4.2 lakh and an illustrative agency fee of 8.33%, that is about ₹8.7 lakh a month.
2. Your internal hiring cost
Recruiter and coordinator salaries, job-board and database licences, assessment tools, advertising and the hours hiring managers lose to screening poor CVs.
3. The RPO proposal, fully loaded
Monthly team fee, any per-hire fee at your planned volume, pass-through tools and GST. Then subtract the internal costs RPO genuinely replaces — not the ones you will keep.
RPO KPIs and SLAs, defined so they can be measured
A service level is only useful if both sides count it the same way. These are the measures we report weekly, with how each is calculated.
| Measure | How it is calculated | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first shortlist | Working days from approved requisition to first qualified profiles shared | The earliest signal that a role is hard to fill |
| Time to offer | Calendar days from requisition approval to offer released | What the business feels; includes your interview speed |
| Shortlist-to-interview ratio | Profiles interviewed ÷ profiles shared | Screening quality — low means we are sending the wrong people |
| Interview-to-offer ratio | Offers ÷ candidates interviewed | Calibration between recruiter and hiring manager |
| Offer acceptance | Offers accepted ÷ offers made | Pay competitiveness and candidate experience |
| Offer-to-joining | Joiners ÷ accepted offers | Notice-period engagement; critical in Indian markets |
| 90-day retention | Hires still employed at day 90 ÷ hires joined | The best early proxy for quality of hire |
| Cost per hire | All hiring spend in the period ÷ hires joined | The number the RPO case was built on |
Candidate data in an RPO: who is responsible for what
An RPO team handles thousands of CVs in your name. Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you are usually the Data Fiduciary and the RPO provider acts as your Data Processor — so the contract has to say how that data is handled.
- ✓A data processing clause: we process candidate data only on your instructions and for your hiring
- ✓Candidate notices and consent in your name, in plain language
- ✓Access controls: named recruiters only, inside your ATS where possible
- ✓Retention periods for rejected candidates, and deletion on request
- ✓Breach notification to you without delay, so you can meet your own obligations
- ✓Complete handover — requisitions, pipelines, source data and documents — and deletion from our systems at exit
The first 90 days of an RPO engagement
Transition is where RPO programmes succeed or stall. This is the plan we run to, with your HR team involved at every step.
Discovery
Map current requisitions, approval flows, interview panels, agencies in use and last year's hiring data. Agree the baseline we will be measured against.
Set-up
ATS access, email and templates, careers-page content, sourcing channels and recruiter onboarding on your products, sites and culture.
Parallel run
The RPO team takes new requisitions while existing agencies finish open ones, so nothing in flight is dropped.
Steady state
Weekly funnel reviews, a first monthly report against the baseline, and a quarterly business review at day 90.
When RPO is not the right answer
Low or sporadic hiring
A handful of hires a quarter will not keep a dedicated team productive. Use per-placement recruitment.
One senior hire
A CEO, CFO or business head needs a confidential retained search, not a volume process. See CXO executive search.
You want the workers off your payroll
RPO hires onto your rolls. If you want someone else to be the employer, that is contract staffing.
Questions clients ask before signing a mandate
Answers we give in the first call, written down so you can compare firms on the same terms.
Start the search →When does RPO make more sense than agency hiring?+
Roughly above twenty hires a month, or when hiring is continuous and repeatable — plant ramps, BPO floors, sales expansion. Below that, per-placement or retained search is usually cheaper.
How is RPO priced?+
A monthly fee for the dedicated team, sized to your hiring plan, sometimes with a small per-hire variable for volume beyond plan, plus GST. Whether that beats your current spend depends on volume — the break-even worksheet above shows how to compare it with blended agency fees.
Do RPO recruiters work on our brand or yours?+
Yours. Candidates hear your company name, receive your communication templates and interview in your process. The recruiters carry your email domain where your IT policy allows it.
Do you work inside our ATS?+
Yes. We work in your ATS so your data, funnel history and reporting stay with you. If you do not have one, we can run our own and hand over structured data at exit.
What happens at the end of an RPO contract?+
Requisition history, candidate pipelines, source data and process documentation are handed over. The point of RPO is to leave you with a working process, not a dependency.
What is the difference between RPO and staffing?+
In RPO, the people we recruit join your payroll and we run your hiring process under your brand. In staffing, the workers are employed on the staffing company's payroll and deployed to you. RPO transfers the recruitment process; staffing transfers the employment.
Who owns the candidate data in an RPO?+
You do. We work inside your ATS where possible, act as your data processor, and hand over requisitions, pipelines and source data at the end of the contract, deleting our copies as agreed.
How long is a typical RPO contract?+
Full-cycle RPO is usually agreed for a year or more, because the first quarter is spent on transition. Project RPO runs for the length of the ramp — often three to six months — with a defined hiring target.
Send us your hiring plan for the next two quarters
We will size the team, propose service levels and show what your cost per hire looks like under RPO versus today.