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When Navjot Singh joined the global oil-and-gas company Shell, the company was facing an extraordinary challenge: The rate at which Shell's engineers were retiring meant the global firm needed to more than triple the number of new recruits it hired, from approximately 2,500 to nearly 8,000. Yet at the time, Shell was not considered an employer of choice. The company needed to project a new image-and fast. Says Singh, "In the same way marketers know they need to advertise to be a market leader, HR had to know how to create an employer brand. Marketing is the only way to ensure customers buy products. It was also the only way to ensure Shell got the best people coming to us first." "Wait! Why would Shell's HR guy be talking about marketing?" you might be wondering. As both an HR and marketing expert, Singh saw a powerful synergy between the two. "I'm 50 percent a marketer-the rest is HR, communications, and recruitment," says Singh. Singh initially started out as vice president of customer relationship management, but quickly joined the HR team when he recognized Shell's emerging need for new talent and the immense potential for him to use classic marketing techniques to help the company achieve its objectives. His vision, skill sets, and experience were a perfect match for the company's situation. So in Singh's mind, addressing the company's need for new talent meant building a brand as an employer, which in turn meant creating a cohesive message. But Shell's global recruiting approach was anything but cohesive. "At the time we had 1,200 recruitment systems, 35 recruitment companies, and 400 executive search companies working for us," he recalls. "I attended a careers event at Cambridge University where there were three Shell stands beside each other-one from the UK, one from Malaysia, and another from Nigeria. This was a fragmented approach and tough for candidates to understand." Shell needed to create a unified outreach program if it was going to meet its need for numbers while fulfilling its desire for a global talent pool. The company recruits from among 90 different nationalities each year because it recognizes the benefits of cultural diversity. "It's not enough to tell candidates why they should join Shell. We needed to demonstrate such reasons through the interviewing process and the whole candidate experience," explains Singh. "A motivating candidate experience-from the moment someone hears about Shell to the moment they have joined us-requires a coordinated approach across all the recruitment disciplines: marketing, operations, recruiters, and line managers all need to work together." It also necessitated that personnel take less of a more Shell-concentric perspective and adopt one that focused instead on candidates. Singh and his team set about applying various marketing techniques to the recruitment process, which have since resulted in an 80 percent decrease in the company's recruitment costs and a 20 percent reduction in the time to hire new staff. To attract talented graduates, Shell annually sponsors a popular competition that challenges student teams around the world to solve various food, water, and alternative energy problems. About a thousand teams compete annually. The efforts have paid off. Shell has won more than 75 awards for its unique HR strategy. Better yet, in a recent global survey of 8,400 people in the oil-and-gas sector, Shell received the most mentions from respondents who were asked to name the employers they would most like to work for. Despite Shell's recruiting success, Singh believes the war for talent will be ongoing: "In the future, companies will have to apply for skilled people to work for them rather than candidates applying to work at an organization. HR must still realize the strategic value it can bring."
Answer the following:
Q1. What functions of HRM are similar to marketing functions? How can thinking about "marketing" a company's jobs improve the strategic focus of HR personnel?
Q2. If you were planning to use marketing strategies to "brand" a company as an employer of choice, what are some of the factors you would consider?
Q3. Do you agree with Singh's statement that in the future, companies will have to apply for skilled people to work for them rather than candidates applying to work at an organization? Why or why not?
References and citations would be awesome.