RPO FAQ Section — Strategic Hiring, Project Recruitment & Embedded Solutions
FAQ copy for the built environment / design and construction RPO offer, covering strategic hiring, project recruitment, and embedded solutions.
What is RPO, and how is it different from using a recruitment agency?
RPO means we take ownership of all or part of your hiring — not just filling individual roles when asked. Anagency reacts to vacancies one at a time, usually on a contingency fee. RPO builds and runs the hiring process itself: sourcing, screening, pipeline, and reporting, aligned to your hiring plan rather than triggered role by role.
What's the difference between strategic hiring, project recruitment, and embedded solutions?
Strategic hiring is ongoing partnership on your core, recurring roles — the hires you make every quarter,built around a repeatable process. Project recruitment is a defined, time-boxed engagement for a specific need — a new office opening, a funding round, a bulk hiring push — with a clear start and end. Embedded solutions put our people inside your team, working your systems and reporting into your stakeholders, indistinguishable from an internal hire. Most clients use a mix, shiftingweight between the three as hiring volume changes through the year.
How quickly can you scale up or down?
Faster than building or cutting an internal team. Because we run dedicated delivery capacity across clients, wecan flex resource within days, not the months a hiring or redundancy cycle for an internal team would take. This is usually the single biggest reason clients move from in-house to RPO around a hiring spike or a slowdown.
Do we lose control of our hiring process?
No — you gain visibility, not lose it. Every engagement runs on your employer brand, your candidateexperience, and your criteria. What changes is who's doing the work day to day, not who's making the decisions. You get reporting and access most in-house teams don't build for themselves.
How is this priced — is it a fee per hire, like an agency?
Rarely. Most engagements run on a retainer or subscription model tied to a defined scope of delivery — a setnumber of roles, a set team size, or a defined project — rather than a percentage fee per hire. This removes the incentive misalignment of contingency recruitment, where speed and volume are rewarded over fit.
What size of hiring volume makes RPO worth it over an in-house team or an agency?
As a rough guide: under 10-15hires a year, an in-house team or occasional agency use is usually sufficient.Above that, particularly with volume concentrated in bursts, RPO models typically outperform on both cost-per-hire and time-to-hire, because dedicated delivery capacity removes the ramp-up delay of scaling an internal team.
Can you work alongside our existing in-house talent team?
Yes — this is the most common model. We typically take on volume, project spikes, or specific hard-to-fillareas, freeing your in-house team to focus on strategic hires, employer brand, and stakeholder management rather than day-to-day sourcing and screening.
What sectors and role types do you cover?
Built environment, design, and construction is our primary focus — architecture and design practices, civil engineering and infrastructure firms, project and programme management consultancies, cost consultancies, and contractors from main contractor through supply chain. We cover roles from delivery and technical hires through to commercial, bid, planning, and design leadership — the volume and seniority mix shifts by client, but the sector focus stays constant. That depth is what separates a specialist RPO from a generalist one running the same playbook across every industry.
How do you use AI and technology in the hiring process?
Sourcing and initial screening are AI-assisted, which shortens time-to-long list significantly — but everycandidate a client sees has been reviewed and assessed by a person. AI removes volume-handling work, not judgment.
What happens at the end of a project recruitment engagement?
The engagement closes on the agreed scope — a defined number of hires or a fixed timeline — with a handoverof process documentation, sourcing channels used, and market data gathered, so your team can run the same process again without starting from zero.
Is there a minimum contract length?
No. Project recruitment is scoped to the engagement itself — a defined number of hires or a fixed timeline— and closes when that's delivered. Strategic hiring and embedded solutions run on rolling terms with no minimum tie-in, because the model only holds up if thepartnership keeps earning its place month to month, not because a contract locks you in.
How is this different from the other RPO/embedded providers in the market?
Fair to compare us directly —ask any provider the same questions above (pricing model, scaling speed, in-house handover, sector depth) and compare answers side by side. What tends to separate providers is less the label they use and more whether the delivery team has real sector depth or is running generalist recruiters across every client.
Written by George Dobbins, Founder of Arcavia Consulting — talent intelligence for the built environment.
Last updated: 14 July 2026