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Your Entire Hiring Function.
Owned and Delivered.
Stop managing a hiring process that's taking your leadership's time and still underdelivering. Hire Nexera becomes your recruiting function — owning the pipeline, the process, and the outcomes — so your team can focus on building the product.
- We own the full recruitment cycle — not just the CVs
- Embedded recruiters who work as your internal talent team
- Scales with your hiring volume — 2 hires or 200
- Full reporting, pipeline visibility, and hiring analytics
Not a recruiter. Not an agency.
Your entire hiring function.
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a model where an external provider takes full or partial ownership of your company's recruitment function — acting as your internal talent acquisition team rather than an outside agency sending CVs.
At Hire Nexera, our RPO service embeds dedicated recruiters into your business who understand your culture, your hiring bar, and your engineering standards. We own the sourcing, the screening, the interview coordination, the offer management, and the reporting giving your leadership team back the time currently absorbed by a hiring process that still doesn't move fast enough. Whether you need to hire 5 engineers or 50, we run the system that makes it happen predictably and at quality.
RPO vs Traditional Recruiting vs In-House TA — what's the real difference?
Most companies fall between models without realising it — using an agency like a recruiter and an in-house team like an admin function. Here's how the three approaches actually compare, and when RPO is the right choice.
Dedicated recruiters who become your internal talent acquisition function — owning the full process, hitting defined hiring targets, and reporting against agreed metrics. You get the output of an in-house TA team without building one.
An agency fills individual roles on request — no ownership of the process, no responsibility beyond placing the candidate. Fee per placement. No commitment to your overall hiring outcomes.
An internal TA team offers deep culture knowledge but comes with fixed headcount costs, hiring peaks and troughs your team can't absorb, and long ramp times when you need to scale recruiting capacity.
Why your hiring process is costing more than you think.
Broken hiring is a hidden operating cost that almost every scaling tech company underestimates. The direct fees are obvious. What isn't is everything else.
Engineering leadership is running the hiring process
In most scaling tech companies, CTOs and VPs of Engineering spend 20–30% of their time on hiring — reviewing CVs, briefing agencies, coordinating interviews, chasing feedback. That's not their job. Every hour your technical leadership spends on recruitment admin is an hour not spent on architecture, team development, or product delivery.
Agency fees at scale are commercially unsustainable
A single-placement agency fee is manageable. Multiply it across a 20-hire growth year at 15–20% of base salary per placement and you have an enormous and structurally inefficient hiring cost. RPO converts unpredictable, per-placement fees into a predictable, scalable model that costs significantly less per hire as volume grows.
No visibility, no accountability, no pipeline data
When you're managing multiple agencies and an informal internal process, you have no single view of your hiring pipeline. You can't forecast where you'll be in 60 days. You can't identify where quality is dropping. You react to problems that a proper system would have flagged weeks earlier — usually just as a key project is about to start without the headcount you planned for.
We don't send you candidates. We run your hiring.
Our RPO model embeds dedicated IT recruitment specialists into your business who operate as your internal talent acquisition function — with the industry knowledge, the tech-native screening process, and the reporting infrastructure to make hiring a predictable output rather than a constant crisis.
Dedicated recruiters who know your business
Your RPO team isn't a shared resource pool — it's a dedicated group of IT recruitment specialists who learn your culture, your engineering standards, your hiring bar, and your team dynamics. They brief hiring managers, they know which candidates you've rejected before, and they build institutional knowledge that compounds over time.
Full pipeline ownership — not just sourcing
We own job briefing, sourcing, screening, technical assessment coordination, interview scheduling, candidate communication, offer management, and onboarding handover. Your leadership team sees candidates at the interview stage — not at every step before it.
Real-time pipeline reporting and hiring analytics
Every role, every candidate, every stage — visible in real time. Weekly hiring reports, pipeline velocity data, conversion rate analysis, and hiring forecast projections. You always know exactly where your hiring stands and what's coming in 30, 60, and 90 days.
Lower cost-per-hire as volume grows
Unlike per-placement agency fees that compound as your team grows, our RPO model becomes more cost-efficient at scale. We agree a structure at the outset — whether monthly retainer, per-hire, or hybrid — that's transparent, predictable, and significantly cheaper than the agency model at any meaningful hiring volume.
Three RPO structures — matched to your hiring volume and needs.
Not every company needs full end-to-end RPO on day one. We offer three engagement structures so you can start where it makes sense and scale accordingly.
From discovery to fully operational in 4 stages.
We don't start placing candidates on day one. We start by understanding your hiring function, your engineering culture, and your hiring targets — so that what we build actually solves the right problem.
Discovery & Audit
We map your current hiring process, your tech stack, your team structure, your hiring bar, and where the bottlenecks are. We define the SLAs, the reporting cadence, and the success metrics before we begin.
Week 1Team Setup & Integration
Your dedicated RPO team is briefed, integrated into your tools (ATS, Slack, calendar), and introduced to your hiring managers. We align on role briefs, process, and candidate quality standards for every discipline we'll hire in.
Week 2Pipeline Activated
Active sourcing begins across all agreed roles. Candidates enter a structured screening process. Your hiring managers only see shortlisted profiles — each with a written assessment and fit rationale. Weekly pipeline reports start from day one.
Week 2–3Ongoing & Optimising
We run the hiring function with continuous optimisation — tracking conversion rates at each stage, refining sourcing channels, and adjusting approach based on what the data shows. Monthly strategy reviews keep us aligned with your business priorities.
OngoingEvery stage of your hiring cycle — managed by us.
RPO is not CV delivery. This is everything your dedicated Hire Nexera team takes off your plate and runs — properly, consistently, and with full accountability.
Job Briefing & Role Design
We work with hiring managers to define each role properly — scope, level, success criteria, and realistic compensation. A well-defined brief produces better candidates and fewer wasted interview cycles.
Active Sourcing
Multi-channel sourcing across LinkedIn, GitHub, niche job boards, developer communities, referral networks, and our own pre-vetted candidate pool — calibrated to the specific role and seniority level.
Technical Screening
Every candidate goes through our structured technical assessment process before reaching your shortlist — role-specific, reviewed by engineers, verified for accuracy. No keyword matching, no unvetted CVs landing in your inbox.
Interview Coordination
We own all interview scheduling, interviewer briefing, candidate preparation, and panel coordination. Your hiring managers show up to interviews — not to calendar invites, Zoom link chaos, and last-minute rescheduling.
Candidate Communication
Every candidate — shortlisted or not — receives professional, timely communication throughout the process. Candidate experience directly affects employer brand, and we manage it as carefully as the hiring outcome.
Offer Management & Reporting
We manage offer negotiation, coordinate between candidate and hiring manager, and handle the acceptance process. Full pipeline reporting, hiring velocity data, conversion rates, and 30/60/90-day forecasts delivered weekly.
RPO built specifically for IT hiring — not general recruitment repurposed.
Most RPO providers were built for high-volume generalist hiring — customer support, sales, operations. We were built exclusively for technology. That's not a positioning statement. It changes what our recruiters can actually do.
Tech-native recruiters only
Every recruiter in our RPO team has a background in technology recruitment. They understand the stack you're hiring for, the seniority signals that matter, and what a strong engineering candidate actually looks like — not just on paper.
Dedicated team — no shared resource pools
Your RPO engagement comes with named, dedicated recruiters who work exclusively on your account. Not a shared pool that reprioritises based on the easiest fee. You get people who know your business and are accountable to your outcomes.
Full pipeline visibility — weekly
Weekly hiring reports cover every active role: candidates at each stage, conversion rates, time-in-stage data, and what's expected to complete in the next 30 days. No surprises at quarter end when the headcount plan hasn't been met.
Predictable cost — no fee surprises
Our RPO pricing is agreed upfront — whether monthly retainer, per-hire, or hybrid. There are no hidden placement fees, no per-CV charges, and no cost escalation when hiring volume picks up. You know what you'll pay before we start.
Global talent reach
We source IT professionals from the US, UK, EU, Eastern Europe, LatAm, and Asia — applying the same vetting standard regardless of geography. If your company hires remotely, our RPO function is built to match.
SLA-backed hiring commitments
We agree defined SLAs at the start of every RPO engagement — time-to-shortlist, time-to-fill, shortlist quality standards, and candidate satisfaction benchmarks. Our performance is measured, not assumed. We hold ourselves accountable to numbers, not promises.
Most RPO providers were built for volume. We were built for quality at volume.
High-volume generalist RPO optimises for speed and fill rate because that's what most clients ask for. In engineering recruitment, quality failures at volume are catastrophic — bad hires in senior technical roles cost ten times more to fix than the placement fee that placed them. Our RPO process applies the same technical screening rigour to every candidate regardless of volume. We don't lower the bar to hit a fill-rate target. We build a system that hits the target at the bar.
We understand the sector you're hiring in.
Sector context is baked into every RPO engagement we run. The candidate profile for a senior backend engineer at a FinTech is not the same as one at a HealthTech — and our RPO team is briefed to know the difference.
What happens when your hiring function actually works.
Real outcomes from engineering leaders who stopped managing a broken process and handed it to people whose job it is to run it.
We hired 24 engineers in 9 months through Hire Nexera's RPO — a volume we'd never come close to with our previous agency-led model. My time spent on recruitment admin dropped from 2 days a week to about 2 hours. The pipeline reporting alone changed how we plan quarters.
Post-Series A, we needed to double the engineering team in six months. We modelled full RPO vs agency and the cost difference was over 200k in our favour. The quality was better too — Hire Nexera's technical screening is genuinely more rigorous than anything our previous agencies were doing.
We started with selective RPO — just for senior engineering roles where our internal TA struggled. Within three months, we'd expanded to full RPO across the tech team. The difference in quality, speed, and visibility was impossible to ignore once we'd seen it working.
Frequently Asked Questions
Straight answers to the questions CTO and VP Engineering leaders ask before committing to an RPO model.
An agency fills individual roles when you ask them to — transactional, per-placement, no ownership of your process or your hiring outcomes. RPO is the transfer of full or partial recruitment function to an external provider who acts as your internal talent acquisition team. With RPO, a dedicated team is embedded in your business, owning sourcing, screening, interview coordination, offer management, and reporting — accountable to SLAs and hiring targets, not just placement fees. The fundamental difference is ownership: an agency is a supplier; an RPO provider is a function.
RPO pricing is structured as a monthly retainer, a per-hire fee, or a hybrid of both — agreed upfront before we start. The right structure depends on your hiring volume and predictability: high and consistent volume suits a monthly retainer; variable or project-based hiring typically suits a per-hire or hybrid model. In all cases, the cost-per-hire under RPO is significantly lower than equivalent agency fees at any meaningful hiring volume. We share a full commercial proposal after our discovery call, before you commit to anything.
For Full RPO, we typically work with companies planning 12 or more hires per year — where the volume justifies a dedicated embedded team. For Project RPO, the threshold is lower — if you're hiring 5–10 engineers within a defined 3–6 month window post-funding or for a specific product build, project RPO is commercially viable and often significantly cheaper than agency fees for the same volume. For Selective RPO — where we run RPO for engineering roles specifically alongside an existing internal TA team — there's no minimum. We'll be honest in our discovery call about which model makes commercial sense for your situation.
Yes — this is exactly what our Selective RPO model is designed for. Many companies have a capable internal TA team for general hiring but lack the technical depth to hire senior engineers, data scientists, or ML engineers effectively. We run RPO specifically for the technical roles where depth matters — working in parallel with your internal team, sharing the ATS and reporting infrastructure, and complementing rather than replacing what they do. The handoff process between our team and yours is clearly defined from the outset.
For most engagements, we move from signed agreement to active sourcing within two weeks. Week one covers discovery and audit — understanding your current process, hiring bar, team structure, and role priorities. Week two covers team setup and integration — your RPO team meets hiring managers, gets integrated into your ATS and tools, and aligns on role briefs and quality standards. Active sourcing begins within 2–3 weeks of agreement. For Project RPO with tight timelines, we can compress the setup phase to one week when necessary.
Weekly pipeline reports cover every active role — candidates at each stage, time-in-stage, conversion rates, and expected completions in the next 30 days. Monthly strategy reviews cover broader patterns: sourcing channel performance, interview-to-offer conversion rates, candidate drop-off analysis, and 60/90-day hiring forecasts. All reporting is shared in your preferred format — whether that's a live dashboard, a Notion page, or a weekly email. Reporting format and cadence is agreed during the setup phase.
You own everything. All candidate data, pipeline records, ATS content, and hiring documentation belongs to your company throughout the engagement and after it ends. If you transition to an internal TA team or a different model, we support a structured handover that ensures no pipeline continuity is lost. Data portability and ownership terms are explicitly documented in your engagement agreement before we begin. There are no lock-in clauses that would prevent you from transitioning your hiring function when and how you choose.
Specialist and hard-to-fill roles are where tech-native RPO earns its value most visibly. For niche roles — principal ML engineers, staff-level distributed systems engineers, specialist security architects — we activate our direct sourcing capability: outreach to passive candidates via GitHub and LinkedIn, community sourcing in specialist forums, and referral activation from our existing network. These roles get a dedicated sourcing plan agreed upfront with realistic timeline expectations — not a vague promise and a two-week silence. If a role is genuinely very hard to fill, we tell you that in the briefing, not three weeks into a failed search.