Recruitment Process Outsourcing is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer outsources or transfers all or part of its recruitment activities to an external service provider.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer transfers all or part of its recruitment processes to an external service provider. An RPO provider can provide its own or may assume the company's staff, technology, methodologies and reporting. In all cases, RPO differs greatly from providers such as staffing companies and contingent/retained search providers in that it assumes ownership of the design and management of the recruitment process and the responsibility of results.

Occasional recruitment support, for example temporary, contingency and executive search services is more analogous to out-tasking, co-sourcing or just sourcing. In this example the service provider is "a" source for certain types of recruitment activity. The biggest distinction between RPO and other types of staffing is Process. In RPO the service provider assumes ownership of the process, while in other types of staffing the service provider is part of a process controlled by the organization buying their services.