As recruitment becomes more important to organizations, and takes up more time, businesses are often taking advantage of the option to outsource all of their staffing provision to a specialist RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) provider. An MSC (managed service company) or RPO aims to outsource the responsibility of the full recruitment process from one client. This puts the administrative responsibility firmly in the lap of the MSC and it is important, for the success of the relationship, that this is seen as a partnership rather than a pure supplier relationship on both sides. Typically the MSC will have recruiters on site at the client and contracts will be negotiated for three or more years with a 20 THE RECRUITMENT INDUSTRY six-month option to terminate. Some MSCs will be vendor neutral and others will be the RPO arm of a larger recruitment consultancy. If one consultancy supplier has been very successful supplying staff across
the organization, that business may consider a master vendor (MV) arrangement where the agency contracts to supply the vast majority of the staff at some cost benefit to the business, and fill the rest of the role through some specialist arrangement it makes itself with other suppliers. This leaves the administrative burden with the business and can leave it vulnerable if the MV cannot deliver, as it will have severed all other relationships. However it will dramatically reduce the amount of contacts the business has to deal with, and if it predominantly recruits a particular type of individual this can be a good choice. Many organizations will run recruitment in-house and develop a PSL (preferred supplier list) to support the recruitment process. PSLs are usually a collection of agencies, often through a tiered or niche system, which are the sole suppliers of staffing into that organization or MSC.