Enterprise recruitment market points to overall good health of staffing industry

Recruitment businesses have good cause to be optimistic

The uncertainty that seems to be one of the hallmarks of our times does tend to darken the mood and cast a shadow over optimism. There have been successive blows to the world economy and we barely get through one before another is upon us. These have destabilised markets and caused the vast majority of businesses significant headaches as they contend with challenges such as rising costs, fluctuating supply and demand, and recruitment issues.

However, for the recruitment industry, despite contending with serious shortages of skills and talent, one area points to the overall good health of the sector and continuing prosperity, giving recruitment businesses good cause to be optimistic.

The growth of the global market for Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is expected to remain strong in the forthcoming years. RPO services, where clients subcontract their staffing needs to an external recruitment house, are increasing in popularity as they enable the client organisation to focus on its core business activities and bring about a substantial reduction in overheads.

Short-term hit but bigger picture suggests double-digit growth

Market data on the RPO market is very encouraging and indicates an optimistic future for the recruitment sector as a whole. Through the Covid-19 pandemic, the RPO market has seen favourable results. It has positively and continuously evolved, in terms of service portfolio, value proposition, and through new recruiting processes.

Despite changes to the job market, including the widespread adoption of the working from home (WFH) model, RPO has held its own, by providing a value proposition that aligns with fluctuations in the hiring requirements of enterprises.

In 2021 estimated revenues in the RPO market reached £4.2bn, a fall of 7% year on year. However, this is a short-term hit, and the bigger picture suggests growth well into double digits is ahead. In terms of revenue, global next generation RPO market report data and research predicts a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.5% over the period 2021–29.

Traditionally, the regions with the most intense RPO activity are the EU and North America, the combined values of which comprised some 80% of the world market up to 2020.

However, APAC, including Australia is set to see the fastest growth in the coming years. Asia Pacific countries have seen significant IT industry growth over the last decade, and leading companies across APAC are increasingly using RPO to manage such elements as talent acquisition, employer branding and recruitment marketing. This is not to playdown the significance of the UK, the EU and the Americas which are also expected to show significant growth as the economic recovery from Covid continues to unwind globally.

Make ETZ your RecTech partner whatever your recruitment business model

Not every agency wants to play in the enterprise recruitment space or use RPO as a business model; but, whatever services your recruitment agency offers, ETZ’s market leading timesheet, invoicing and payment platform streamlines your back office operations.

Our complementary RecTech solutions also include ETZ Comply for onboarding, documentation and contract management, and Caspian for extracting business intelligence from across all the software and apps you use to run your business.

Make ETZ your RecTech partner of choice, and we’ll help you obtain excellent value from technology. To find out more, call us on 0800 311 2266 or book a demo.