Service Recruitment Process Outsourcing

Your recruiting function,
run by experts.

When hiring volume outpaces your team — a funded growth year, a new market, a re-org — Crimson Talent RPO drops a dedicated, managed recruiting operation inside your company. Process, people, and platform, all owned by us and reported like it's our own P&L.

Dedicated pod · your employer brand · our process & data
app.crimsontalent.com/rpo
32
Active reqs managed
-41%
Cost per hire
19 d
Median time to fill
Hires delivered · rolling 8 weeks▲ on plan

Not a staffing vendor.
A recruiting function you rent.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing is a managed service, not a résumé feed. Instead of paying a contingency agency a percentage every time they place someone, you engage Crimson to run all — or a defined slice — of your talent acquisition. We embed a dedicated recruiting pod inside your organization, plug into your ATS and interview loops, and take end-to-end ownership of the funnel: sourcing, screening, scheduling, offer management, and onboarding coordination.

The difference candidates and hiring managers feel is that we operate as your team, under your brand. Applicants apply to your careers page, hear from a recruiter with your email address, and never know a partner is behind the process. Internally, your leadership gets one accountable program lead, weekly reporting against plan, and a cost structure that's predictable rather than transaction-by-transaction.

RPO is the right model when hiring is sustained and strategic — when you're scaling a department, opening an office, integrating an acquisition, or simply tired of stitching together agencies and juggling contractor recruiters. It's less about filling a single hard role and more about building a repeatable, measurable engine that grows and contracts with your plan.

Contingency agency

Fast, but transactional

You pay a placement fee (typically 20–30% of salary) only when someone starts. Great for a one-off hard-to-fill role, but costs balloon at volume, quality varies by recruiter, and no one owns your funnel or your data.

Best whenOne or two urgent, specialized roles a quarter.
Crimson RPO

Owned, measured, scalable

A dedicated pod runs your process end to end under your brand, on a predictable subscription. Cost per hire drops as volume rises, every metric lives in one dashboard, and capacity flexes with your hiring plan.

Best whenSustained hiring — a growth year, a new market, a re-org.
In-house team

Committed, but rigid

Full control and deep culture knowledge, but headcount is slow to hire, expensive to carry, and painful to unwind when a hiring surge ends. Ramping an internal team for a spike often takes longer than the spike itself.

Best whenSteady, permanent baseline hiring you can staff for.

A complete recruiting engine,
without the overhead.

Every engagement ships with the same foundation — a team, a process, your brand, and the data to prove it's working.

Dedicated team

A named pod — sourcers, recruiters, a coordinator, and a program lead — working only on your roles. Not shared, not rotating, not a queue you wait in behind other clients.

End-to-end process

Intake calibration, sourcing, screening, interview scheduling, offer negotiation, and onboarding hand-off. We run every stage so your hiring managers only ever meet qualified, interested candidates.

Your employer brand

Candidates experience you, not us — your careers page, your email domain, your voice. We operate as an invisible extension of your talent team, protecting the candidate experience you've built.

Data & reporting

Powered by our Talent Analytics platform. Real-time dashboards on pipeline health, cost per hire, source of hire, funnel conversion, and time to fill — shared, not siloed.

Scales up & down

Flex capacity with your hiring plan. Add recruiters for a funded growth year, dial back when a hiring wave closes — without severance, ramp-down, or the cost of carrying idle headcount.

Compliant & secure

SOC 2 Type II controls, background-checked recruiters, and an EEO-compliant, auditable process built in from day one. Candidate data is handled under GDPR and CCPA standards, every time.

Live in 2–4 weeks, not quarters.

A structured onboarding gets your pod embedded and delivering fast — then we tune the engine as the data comes in.

01
Week 1

Discover

We map your hiring plan, priority roles, interview loops, tools, and past bottlenecks. Together we set target metrics — time to fill, cost per hire, offer-accept — and agree on scorecards for every role.

02
Weeks 2–4

Embed

Your dedicated pod integrates with your ATS, email domain, and brand, then runs calibration interviews to lock alignment with hiring managers. By the end of week four we're sourcing live against your roles.

03
Ongoing

Deliver

We own the funnel and drive it to hire — sourcing, screening, scheduling, and offer management — reporting weekly against plan. You get one accountable program lead and a shared, always-on dashboard.

04
Every quarter

Optimize

We review the data with your leadership, cut the channels that don't convert, double down on the ones that do, and re-forecast capacity so the engine keeps pace with a plan that never stops changing.

One model rarely fits.
So we built three.

Whether you're outsourcing the whole function or backfilling capacity for a quarter, there's a structure — and a price — that fits.

Enterprise RPO

We run your entire talent acquisition function as a managed operation — multiple pods, dedicated leadership, and full accountability for volume across departments and geographies. A true build-vs-buy alternative to standing up a large internal team.

Best forCompanies hiring 50–500+ a year who want a mature function without the fixed headcount.

Project RPO

A time-boxed burst of hiring for a specific event — a new office, a product line, a funding-fueled expansion, or an acquisition integration. A defined scope, defined headcount target, and a defined end date, with the pod dissolving cleanly when the project ships.

Best forA concentrated hiring wave — say, 40 hires in two quarters — that would swamp your team.

On-Demand Recruiter

Embedded recruiters on a monthly subscription to add flex capacity beside your existing team. Scale from one recruiter to several in days, cover parental leave or a spike, and pause without penalty when things quiet down — no long-term commitment.

Best forTalent teams that need elastic capacity and want to keep hiring in-house.

What embedded recruiting actually moves.

-41%
average reduction in cost per hire versus agency spend
2–4 wks
to a fully embedded, sourcing-live team
19 days
median time to fill on managed reqs
94%
offer-accept rate across engagements

40 hires in two quarters,
without breaking the team.

Series C · B2B SaaS · 380 employees

A newly funded SaaS company needed to grow engineering and go-to-market by 40 people in six months — with a two-person talent team.

The challenge

Fresh off a $60M Series C, leadership committed to 40 hires across engineering, product, and sales in two quarters. Their internal recruiting team of two was already at capacity, three contingency agencies were sending overlapping candidates at 25% fees, and hiring managers were spending a full day a week screening. Cost per hire was climbing and time to fill had drifted past 45 days.

What Crimson did

  • Embedded a five-person Project RPO pod in 18 days, integrated with their Greenhouse ATS and brand.
  • Consolidated all sourcing under one funnel and retired the three agencies within a month.
  • Ran structured, scorecard-based screens so managers only met vetted, interested finalists.
  • Reported weekly to the VP People on pipeline, conversion, and forecast versus plan.
43
hires delivered in two quarters
-38%
cost per hire vs. prior agency model
21d
median time to fill, down from 45
96%
offer-accept rate across the wave
"Crimson gave us a real recruiting function overnight. Our managers got their weeks back, our cost per hire dropped, and we hit the plan a full month early — then scaled the pod down when the wave was done."
M
Maya Ellison
VP People, Series C SaaS

Built to be trusted
with your people data.

RPO means giving a partner deep access to your systems, your candidates, and your process. We hold ourselves to enterprise standards on every engagement — so your legal, security, and HR teams sign off fast.

Explore Security & Trust

SOC 2 Type II

Independently audited controls covering security, availability, and confidentiality.

Background-checked recruiters

Every recruiter is vetted and screened before ever touching your candidate data.

EEO-compliant process

Structured, scorecard-based hiring with an auditable trail on every requisition.

Data protection

Candidate PII handled under GDPR and CCPA, with encryption in transit and at rest.

The things buyers
always ask us.

On-Demand Recruiter starts at a single embedded recruiter on a rolling monthly basis, so you can start small and pause without penalty. Project and Enterprise RPO are typically scoped for a minimum of three months — long enough to embed the pod, prove the metrics, and deliver against a real hiring plan. There's no multi-year lock-in on any model.
Most pods are fully embedded and sourcing live within 2–4 weeks of kickoff. Week one is discovery and calibration; weeks two through four cover ATS and brand integration, hiring-manager alignment, and the first sourcing sprints. For urgent Project RPO waves we've stood up a full five-person pod in under three weeks.
Yours, always. Candidates apply through your careers page, receive outreach from a recruiter using your email domain, and interview under your name. Our recruiters operate as an extension of your talent team — the goal is that no applicant ever knows a partner is running the process. Your employer brand and candidate experience stay entirely intact.
RPO is a predictable subscription, not a per-placement fee. On-Demand Recruiter is a flat monthly rate per embedded recruiter. Project RPO is a fixed program fee scoped to your headcount target and timeline. Enterprise RPO is a management fee sized to your annual hiring volume, often blended with a modest per-hire component. In every case, effective cost per hire falls as volume rises — the opposite of the agency model.
You scale the pod down — that flexibility is the whole point. We re-forecast capacity every quarter against your plan, and you can reduce recruiters, pause an On-Demand engagement, or wind down a Project pod cleanly when the wave closes. No severance, no idle headcount on your books, and no penalty for right-sizing to what the business actually needs.

Scale hiring without scaling headcount.

Tell us about your hiring plan — the roles, the volume, the timeline — and we'll design an RPO model that fits your budget and gets a dedicated pod sourcing in weeks.

Talk to our RPO team