A boutique alternative to traditional RPO.
Traditional Recruitment Process Outsourcing was built for Fortune 500 companies hiring thousands of people a year. Most of our clients hire five to fifty. GrayWorks is outsourced recruiting shaped for the rest of the market — embedded, senior, collaborative, and paid for the function, not the placement.
Outsourced recruiting, on a retainer.
Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a model where a company hands some — or all — of its talent acquisition function to an outside partner. Instead of paying per hire like an agency, you pay for the function itself: sourcing, screening, pipeline management, interview coordination, offer support, reporting. The RPO partner works inside your systems and represents your company to candidates.
It's a strong model. The problem is that the big RPO firms were built for enterprise volume — multi-year contracts, minimum role counts, offshore sourcing pods, SLAs measured in hundreds. For a 50-person company hiring six people this year, that's a bad fit in every direction.
- Paid for the function, not per placement
- Embedded in your ATS, tools, and workflows
- Represents your company to every candidate
- Owns sourcing through offer, end to end
- Reports on pipeline health and funnel metrics
- Builds processes that outlast the engagement
Built for volume you don't have.
Enterprise RPO firms need scale to make their unit economics work. That pressure shows up as minimum hiring commitments, long lock-in contracts, and sourcing pods staffed by junior recruiters who are filling reqs for a dozen clients at once. The candidate experience feels generic. The reporting feels like a dashboard no one reads. And the moment you want to course-correct, the contract is already signed for the year.
Small and mid-size companies need the RPO model — embedded, full-function, on a retainer — but at human scale. One senior recruiter. Your brand. Flexible terms. That's where GrayWorks fits.
- Enterprise minimums most SMBs can't hit
- Long contracts with limited flexibility
- Junior sourcers juggling many clients
- Generic candidate experience
- Reporting designed for procurement, not hiring managers
- Onboarding that takes months, not weeks
RPO at a human scale.
A GrayWorks engagement is the same core idea as traditional RPO — we run the recruiting function for you, inside your systems, on a monthly retainer — but the shape of it is built for teams of 20 to 500. One senior talent acquisition consultant. Your ATS. Your voice in candidate emails. Your hiring managers on the syncs. Short onboarding, transparent reporting, no placement fees. If it stops working, you can end the engagement at the end of any month.
Most clients start with a three-month commitment while we get set up, then go month-to-month from there. No enterprise procurement process required.
- One senior recruiter, not a sourcing pod
- Embedded in your ATS, Slack, and calendar
- Candidate-facing as your company, not ours
- Monthly retainer, no placement fees, ever
- Three-month minimum, month-to-month after
- Weekly reporting your hiring managers will actually read
- Every process improvement stays with you
Same idea, different shape.
- Minimum role counts and annual commitments
- Sourcing pods juggling many clients
- Procurement-grade onboarding timelines
- Reporting built for HR operations leaders
- Rigid playbooks across every engagement
- One senior recruiter, built around your team
- Embedded in your ATS, Slack, and voice
- Set up in weeks, not quarters
- Reporting built for hiring managers
- Shaped to how your company actually hires
If any of this sounds familiar.
Boutique RPO is a fit for companies who've outgrown agency roulette but don't have the volume — or the appetite — for an enterprise RPO contract.
- 20 – 500 employees, hiring 5 – 50 roles a year
- Tired of paying 20% of salary to a different agency every time
- Looking for outsourced recruiting that feels in-house
- No internal recruiter — or a stretched-thin HR generalist
- Want predictable monthly cost, not surprise placement fees
- Evaluating RPO but the enterprise options are overkill
Outsourced recruiting, right-sized.
A 30-minute intro call is the easiest way to figure out whether boutique RPO is the right shape for your team — or whether a fractional engagement or single full-cycle search is a better starting point.
Start a conversation →