If confession is good for the soul, as I was always told in Catholic school, then I have a big confession to make: I just don’t get recruitment process outsourcing.

We’ve written about RPO before, including this story, but I am one of those guys who wonder why, if people and talent are considered the lifeblood of any organization, a smart business would outsource the recruiting of that lifeblood to somebody else. It just never made much sense to me.

Well, I have finally had someone explain RPO in terms that even I could understand.

That someone is Paul Maxim, the global resourcing director at Unilever, the $90 billion global giant with more than 400 brands and 179,000 employees in more than 100 countries worldwide. Maxim put on a breakout session on “Recruiting & Retaining Talent Globally” in Orlando during Vurv Revolution 2008, the annual user group conference for Vurv, the Jacksonville, Florida-based technology company that specializes in talent management software.

Maxim made a compelling case for why outsourcing much of the recruitment process can really help. He talked about the benefits it creates for a company like Unilever that is hiring people in many different markets and particularly, in challenging talent environments like India and China.

Here’s what sold me: Maxim says that in the company’s revamped HR operating framework, despite outsourced recruiting, Unilever retains:

• Management of its “career brand,” resourcing strategy, and talent planning;
• The candidate assessment approach and the hiring decision; and,
• End-to-end responsibility for countries with low, permanent recruitment volume.

Accenture , Unilever’s RPO partner, handles the following:

• End-to-end resourcing services;
• Recruiting technology, deployment and management;
• Suppliers and vendors services management; and,
• All recruitment for jobs below “permanent” positions.

Accenture also centralizes the sourcing of candidates, schedules interviews, does pre-employment checks, facilitates pre-hiring paperwork and handles any other administrative processes. It also manages any other outside vendors to achieve both the best value and agreed-upon service levels while reducing the administrative burden.

The benefits to Unilever, according to Maxim, are a cost-effective, globally consistent service; detailed global reporting; and access to technology—in this case, the Vurv 7.1 recruitment system. In addition, Unilever employees get access to all internal job opportunities, a streamlined online application process and, for hiring managers and HR, regular communications to internal applicants on the hiring process.

More important, it allows Unilever’s HR business partners to be “free to provide strategic services to their management team” at the country level.
If that is what is truly gained with RPO–a greater focus on high-level strategy and the most critical components of the recruiting and hiring process—then I think I finally get RPO.