Recruitment process outsourcers (RPOs) have rejected claims by the founder of office support recruiter Angela Mortimer that their staff are ‘inferior’ to agency staff.

Earlier this month John Mortimer told clients at the company’s Soho office: “What we find is the people actually running RPO tend to be ex-recruiters at quite low salaries, so you are not exactly going to get the best people in recruitment into those particular positions.

“Why would you put an inferior person between my very professional, highly motivated, very well trained consultants and a final hiring manager? That is complete nonsense.”

However, Zain Wadee, UK managing director at Pontoon, Adecco’s RPO operation hit back. He told Recruiter: “John Mortimer is welcome to his opinion but, in our experience, both the MSP [Managed Service Provider] and RPO industries have been consistently growing globally by double digits each year as clients value these services. His thoughts are a minority perspective and do not align with the positive feedback our clients have provided on the quality, effectiveness and expertise of Pontoon recruiters and account management staff”.

Andrew Mountney, founding partner at in-house recruitment specialist Aspen In-House, told Recruiter: “I don’t believe there is an inferior quality of recruiter in RPOs. They are typically people who are taking their first steps in their in-house career and may not be long out of an agency.

“So I think it is a misnomer to think they are either a failed recruiter, inferior in quality or a cheaper resource to employ than an agency recruiter.”

Mountney said there was no evidence that RPO staff were on low salaries.  Salaries issues are not putting off the best people going into RPO, he added. “Many of the RPOs pay pretty well, particularly in terms of consistency of salary. They may not represent the same OTE (on target earnings opportunities) but are more representative of recruiters’ salary expectations who are often ‘miss sold’ OTEs by agencies, which is often why people often move on from the agency world.”

Lyndsey Simpson, co-owner of RPO the Curve Group, also rejected Mortimer’s claims, describing them as “rubbish”.  Simpson said her company paid a lot of attention to training and that the quality of its staff was “unrivalled”.  And she said that Mortimer had got it wrong about RPO staff being ex-recruiters, with the majority of Curve Group’s staff either home grown or coming from industry before entering recruitment and talent management.

Mortimer blamed RPOs “ponderous recruitment procedures” for “quite literally relegating themselves to the second division” in terms of the talent they could attract. 

“If you are looking for good employees why would a good employee as soon as they have got a whiff of a ponderous recruitment system why would they go anywhere near a client? So already the RPOs, who are engaged in the direct recruitment process are quite literally relegating themselves to the second division of who is in the market place looking for a job in our particular sector.”

Mortimer’s comments came during a presentation in which he launched into a series of stinging criticisms of RPOs, which he defined as “a generic term” for any third party who managed recruitment on behalf of an end client. Mortimer also announced that he had walked away from a contract with one RPO and expected to walk away from six others.