As a marketing organisation, Unilever knows a thing or two about successful brands and how to market them. With several £1bn brands around the world, it prides itself on understanding consumers and attracting them by differentiating its products from the competition. Formed in 1930, Unilever now employs staff in more than 100 countries. And just as it uses its marketing skills in the battle for the pound or dollar in consumers’ pockets, the company is using the same principles in the recruitment space to attract the talent it needs.

As Paul Maxin, Unilever’s global resourcing director, explains: “We understand consumers are consumers, whether we are selling them shampoo or as a potential employer they may want to engage with.”

Yet despite its prowess as a marketing organisation, as recently as the early 2000s the firm had difficulties in finding the right staff, as low awareness among potential employees led to fewer applications in countries such as the Netherlands, where Unilever had a low corporate presence.

The challenge, says Maxin, is to have a high awareness of Unilever as a potential employer, while at the same time having a discriminating employer brand. Continuing the parallel between consumer brands and its own employer brand, Maxin says the key to Unilever’s attraction strategy is “to bring its business to life”. He says the issue struck home when he noticed the similarity of graduate poster campaigns from a number of employers, describing this as “one of those jaw dropping moments”.

Perhaps the most striking example of what Maxin describes as “active deployment of a differentiator” by Unilever involved using recruitment advertising to ask potential applicants how they would transport 12,000 litres of ice cream across a desert.

As Maxin explains: “Those who engaged with that question may well be right for our organisation, but those who don’t recognise the importance of that challenge to our business will not be the people we want in those roles anyway.” The tactic was successful in leading to more applications for supply chain positions. “In some ways you have to be brave because it allows people to self-select at the beginning of the process,” says Maxin. However, the advantage is “we don’t spend the time within our own recruiting processes of having to select them out anyway”.

In Argentina, Unilever reduced the number of applications from 60,000 to 20,000 using tough online activities which allowed management trainees to self select themselves out. Yet in South Africa it increased the offer acceptance from trainees on its management training programme from 50% to 100% by providing them with practical business challenges and case studies.

Maxin emphasises that no two counties are the same. For example, while Unilever has been in India for 75 years and is the number one employer of choice among graduate jobseekers, China is still a work in progress. That said, in the past two years it has improved both its brand awareness and its brand discrimination in the universities and schools it has targeted. “We have brand consistency but that is deployed in a local and effective way,” Maxin adds.

While he is busy honing Unilever’s attraction strategy, the company had very little trouble attracting Maxin himself to his current position. After a varied career on both the ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ sides of the industry, Maxin took little persuading after being approached by a headhunter while taking a sabbatical to develop his travel writing. “It seemed a tremendous opportunity. There are very few global roles within resourcing and recruiting, and Unilever is a truly global business that was, and is now, undergoing significant change,” he says.

Maxin’s Philosophy

In terms of attraction strategy, it’s not about being number one … because that can lead to us having a significant number of applications from people we don’t want to recruit

One of most significant changes on Maxin’s watch has been the rolling out of Unilever’s seven-year outsourcing deal with Accenture to provide HR transactional services in 100 countries. As part of the deal, Accenture also provides end-to-end recruit ment (up to but not including final interviews and hiring decisions) in 20 countries. In July the final piece in the jigsaw was put in place when China “went live”.

Unilever retains control over its resourcing strategy, its talent planning, approach to assessment, as well as hiring decisions. And irrespective of whether recruitment is being undertaken by Accenture in one of the 20 outsourced countries, or in the other 80 countries, where it is ‘insourced’ to Unilever, the model is “a very similar one”, says Maxin. The only difference is that the local caseworkers are provided by Unilever (in Russia and Indonesia, for example) rather than by Accenture (France and the UK, for example).

Maxin says the big benefit for Unilever is that recruiting is carried out to common standards — wherever that may be in the world. “Before the HR transformation project, Unilever didn’t have that common standard, so when it came to bringing people into the business and then potentially moving people around the business, we weren’t necessarily comparing like with like.”

Resourcing at Unilever has changed significantly since Maxin joined the company, both in its attraction strategy and the streamlining of its recruitment processes. And for one of the world’s foremost fast-moving consumer goods companies engaged in a fierce contest to stay ahead of the competition, the only certainty is that that change is set to continue.

Curriculum Vitae

Home town: London

Education: University of Essex

Employment History:

• 1984-87 Speechwriter and researcher for the Parliamentary Liberal Party
• 1988-95 Michael Page
• 1995-96 Manager, Alderwick Consulting
• 1997 Manager, Antal International
• 1998-2005 Senior recruitment manager, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)
• 2006 — present Global resourcing director, Unilever

Company Profile

• Unilever was formed following the 1930 merger of British soap maker Lever Brothers and Dutch margarine company Margarine Unie
• Unilever employs 174,000 staff in 100 countries
• In 2008 its turnover was €40bn (£34bn)
• Unilever receives around 155,000 applications for the 650 places on its graduate trainee scheme
• Unilever brands include Flora, Lipton, Lux and Dove