– The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the conduct of recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), based on a real-life case study of one company in Malaysia. The paper analyses the company’s process of recruitment outsourcing from beginning to end, in three sections: RPO decision, RPO implementation and RPO outcome.
– The case study was carried out through semi-structured interviews with relevant respondents, including the country HR manager, the HR staff and operation managers in the organisation, plus with the RPO provider.
– The key findings, from a theoretical and academic viewpoint, are that RPO decisions and implementation cannot be fully or properly explained by one theory, but are better explained by integrating transaction cost economics, the resource-based view and the Agency Theory. The study also highlights the importance of involving end users in the RPO process.
– While this single case study gives a clear, in-depth insight into the issues in this particular instance, future research extending to a wider range of organisations would serve to expand the findings and provide more generalisable results.
– Practitioners and service providers should be able to draw valuable lessons from the experience of Tech-solution, particularly from the different perceptions and levels of satisfaction about the service provider’s performance between internal HR and the internal end users (operation managers).
– This paper provides a specific and detailed analysis of RPO implementation in practice. It also addresses the call for more RPO outsourcing-specific research in the extant literature.
