Bps World whitepaper

TOTAL
IMMERSION
RESOURCING THAT LIVES
AND BREATHES THE BRAND
A BPS WORLD WHITE PAPER
OUR BRAND
Researched and produced in association with:

Executive summary 3
No man is an island 4
Talent and skills shortages 5
Raising the game 6
Employer branding 7
Brand as a differentiator 7
Brand and culture 8
Brand alignment 9
Brand advocacy 10
Social media 12
Organisational reform 13
Collaborate to accumulate 14
Conclusion: total immersion 16
Case Studies 20
Case Study Zyxel 20
Case Study Caledonian Life Insurance 21
Case Study Gilead Sciences Inc 22
Case Study AMCo 23
CONTENTS
PAGE 2TOTAL IMMERSION - RESOURCING THAT LIVES AND BREATHES THE BRAND

One of the biggest challenges confronting employers coming out of the recession is
not having enough skilled staff. It is a problem which, in some sectors, is so acute it is
threatening to hold back economic recovery.
Shortages are driving growing competition for a
limited pool of talent and hence new approaches to
recruitment. Companies are having to think much
more seriously about how to set themselves apart.
A key weapon in the recruiter’s arsenal has become employer branding whereby
companies seek to attract potential talent by conveying why they are the “employer of
choice”. The problem is this has often been seen as a “bolt on” rather than an integral
part of how to attract and keep the best staff.
However evidence suggests that employer branding is again rising up the agenda
of senior recruiters as part of a broader and more radical redefinition of the role of
human resources. Why are some companies more attractive than others to potential
recruits? Money plays a part of course but if everyone is paying the industry rate there
is far more in play.
Ask a potential recruit who are the names they would work for and the most obvious
might well be Apple, Virgin, Google – all well-known names with an “attitude.” They
may not know much about the company but it is the perception of style and culture.
Today, a company’s success is not just about marketing itself differently from other
companies but also about how the organisation conducts itself: brand is culture and
culture is brand. Evidence suggests a company’s culture is crucial to candidates when
deciding whether to accept a job offer, making it essential for recruiters to match the
values implied by their brand with culturally sympathetic candidates.
To be truly effective, many businesses have learned that the employer brand must
align closely with the broader brand identity projected towards customers. This
requires significant attention to a company’s internal culture and the extent to which
that reflects its values, mindful of the fact that a company’s employees are likely to be
its strongest brand advocates.
Staff must live and breathe the brand, meaning effort needs to be focused on internal
buy-in as part of a philosophy of employee engagement. Brand alignment, therefore,
starts with a company’s internal culture, yet it is precisely this internal dimension of
brand power that is often neglected.
The role of internal culture and brand advocacy among employees becomes
particularly important when it comes to social media. Staff now champion a company’s
identity through blogging and tweeting as “brand ambassadors”. Switched on
recruitment specialists have embraced this phenomenon as part of broader efforts at
digital innovation.
Executive summary

NO MAN IS AN ISLAND
The new proximity of brand and internal culture implies radical organisational reforms
that stress cooperation. Companies are realising that the brand strategy can no longer
be driven solely by traditional marketing activities and requires a cross-functional
perspective. The brand and its values must now become the central criterion of
recruitment and HR functions.
The emphasis on brand is making collaboration between HR and marketing more
necessary and implies the need for changes in both.
As a result, HR is evolving rapidly and engaging closely with other functions
throughout businesses, in particular marketing. The outcome is likely to be a form of
total immersion in which brand mission is the singular focus of all activity. This implies
changes in how human resources and recruitment providers work:
• Closer collaboration with marketing;
• A more comprehensive engagement of HR in all the aspects of a
company’s work;
• Leveraging the personal networks of employees to employ the
brand in recruitment and employee engagement.
Executive summary

Skills shortages and changing demographics are confronting employers with major
challenges as they emerge from the economic downturn.
The government’s own skills watchdog, the UK Commission for Employment and Skills
(UKCES), has warned that a sharp rise in skills shortages threatens to hold back the
pace of economic recovery.1
The results of its Employer Skills Survey 2013 of 91,000
employers show that almost three in 10 vacancies are reported to be hard to fill, and
skill-shortage vacancies represent more than one in five of all vacancies (22%), up
from one in six in 2011 (16%).2
In some sectors, the problem is acute. Industrialists and politicians have warned that
the growing shortage of engineering skills threatens to hold back industry’s developing
recovery and wreck efforts to rebalance the UK economy, with business secretary
Vince Cable commenting that skills shortages were “a massively serious problem”.3
According to the Engineering Employers Federation (EEF), manufacturers face a
recruitment “crunch” with the quality and quantity of graduates failing to match up to
industry needs.4
The EEF says that by 2020 manufacturers will need almost a million
replacement workers, but this demand comes at a time when skills from within the
UK are already in short supply, while companies face ever-increasing difficulties in
recruiting from outside Europe.5
It is not just large companies facing shortages. The latest edition of the Small Business
Index compiled by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) reveals a growing
shortage of skilled workers is proving to be a “significant barrier” to growth in spite of
record confidence.6
Shortages on this scale are a serious matter for businesses, whose success is based
on having the best possible talent, and are also a very serious issue for UK plc.,
potentially inhibiting GDP growth and limiting our ability to compete in the global
marketplace.
The result is growing competition for a limited pool of
talent. The most important task of any employer is to
ensure that they have the right people.
Talent and skills shortages

RAISING THE GAME
As the economy emerges from recession, the pressure on companies to raise their game
grows more intense – adding new variables to the talent equation:
• There is considerable pressure to cut costs and increase productivity,
making the need to place the right people in the right jobs even
more critical.
• Employers must also grapple with the complex reality of competition in
today’s labour market. While technology deepens the talent pool by
giving a recruiter global reach, it has also increased competition as the
traditional barriers of geography crumble, and global competition for
roles is likely to be the norm by 2036.7
• Any assumption that the emerging economies will willingly yield up
their talent for the UK’s benefit is sorely mistaken, as emerging countries
themselves step up the competition for skilled workers. Moreover, UK
visa curbs, as part of a continuing political debate about migration, are
also hitting the talent pool.8
• What employees now want from their working lives has also been
changing radically, with millennials seeking contract careers that
turn established attitudes on their heads. Nearly half of employees now
believe a job for life will soon be a thing of the past and that people will
increasingly work independently, rather than for large organisations.9
• In its seminal report on the future of careers, the Recruitment and
Employment Confederation (REC, 2009) stated: “The next 10 years
will see the birth of the truly portable career, made possible by the
personal empowerment of workers moving confidently among employers
that have mastered the ability to balance their business needs against
those of employees ... we can be fairly confident that the majority
of the workforce will start to identify themselves more as
independent contractors.”10
• Potential candidates increasingly want to work for a business that does
something they believe in. They are looking for more than a job: they
are seeking a company that shares their values and is respected by
their peers.11
Businesses are having to work harder, learn faster, and
become more inventive. In particular, they are having to
think much more seriously about how they set themselves
apart: their brand.
Talent and skills shortages

As the war for talent increases a key weapon in the recruiter’s arsenal has become employer
branding, whereby savvy employers capitalise on the strength of a brand in the effort to lure
top candidates.
Universum has demonstrated that employer branding was already an important
management priority for some companies by 2010.12
Employer Brand International’s
2012/2013 Global Research study found that 39% of companies were planning to increase
their investment in employer branding initiatives.13
But while the evidence shows clearly that a large majority of employers are familiar with the
concept,14
few have measured its impact by calculating the return on investment generated
by this approach to recruitment. A survey by Robert Walters showed that only 31% of hiring
managers say their organisation measures the external perception of their employer brand,
while 38% said they definitely did not measure this.15
Some recruitment industry insiders suggest that while the notion of employer brand has
been around for some time, many businesses still regard it as a form of “bolt on”.
Nonetheless, evidence suggests that employer branding is rising up the agenda of senior
recruiters as part of a broader and more radical redefinition of the role of human resources.16
Employer branding is a well established strategy
companies use to attract potential talent by conveying
why they are the “employer of choice”.
BRAND AS A DIFFERENTIATOR
To give current and future employees a reason to work for it, a company needs to fashion
a unique Employer Value Proposition (EVP), with those managing their EVP effectively
widening their talent pool, improving employee relations, and potentially lowering
salary costs.
While each employer structures an EVP differently, many of the basics – from money to titles
– are often similar across organisations.This means that brand can become the essential
differentiator for potential employees when choosing who to work for – a key reason why
businesses are now having to think much more seriously about their identity.
Dave Ulrich, professor of business administration at Ross School of Business, University of
Michigan, says: “We have done research showing that at least 60-70% of leadership is
the basics, but it’s the 30-40 percent differentiators that really distinguish one leader from
another. It’s the same with products such as automobiles, they are 60-70% the same, they
have four wheels and all the rest, but they are 30-40% different. And the same is true of an
employee coming to a firm, 60-70% of the offer would be the same – pay, working hours
– the real differentiators would be how that firm enables employees to find meaning and
purpose: the brand.”
Research on the talent market reveals that graduates and professionals want to work for
companies with great reputations. When it comes to recruiting, brands provide real pulling power.
Employer branding

LinkedIn’s Talent Brand Index and Lippincott’s BrandView score have together been
used to show clearly the degree to which a compelling brand changes how attractive an
employer is to potential talent, and that companies scoring strongly on both criteria have,
accordingly, a five-year cumulative growth in shareholder value of 36%.17
Brands act as psychological triggers and candidates will
often weigh them heavily when choosing who to work
for – to such an extent that a more highly paid or senior
job with a weaker brand may not be as attractive.
BRAND AND CULTURE
Interbrand, the world’s largest brand consultancy, has explored how strong brands affect
talent recruitment and concluded that top brands attract top candidates because brands
convey stature, values and purpose – the very things that matter to the best candidates.18
Today, brand is indistinguishable from culture: a company’s success is not just about
marketing itself differently from other companies through more daring advertisements
etc., it is also about how the organisation conducts itself in a world where values and
identity are synonymous. Your brand is your culture and your culture is your brand.19
The evidence clearly suggests a company’s culture is crucial to a large proportion of
candidates when deciding whether to accept a job offer.20
This makes it essential for recruiters to match the values implied by their brand with
culturally sympathetic candidates – and to evaluate those candidates not only in terms of
technical know-how and relevant skill-sets but also in terms of their cultural fit.
In a context of skills shortages where there is tough competition between businesses for
the same talent, it becomes even more relevant for the brand to attract the right people.
Anita Holbrow, director of member services at REC, says: “Stronger brands attract more
candidates ... Brand values have become absolutely central to recruitment and business
models without a shadow of doubt, and we are not just talking about big businesses
where this is apparent – it’s apparent in smaller businesses and if you look at lots of
entrepreneurial start-up businesses it’s quite incredible what’s happening: they are
starting their business based on ethical values. There’s a huge competitive war going on
between brands to make sure they are seen as the very best.”
Nonetheless, a brand can also be a victim of its own success: while it can aid the search
for talent, it will also generate many more applications than jobs, which means a strongly
branded employer must handle rejections carefully.
How a company manages the employer brand during the recruitment process has
important implications for its reputation – REC (2013) says that a poor applicant or
candidate experience has a huge impact on perception of the overall brand.21
Employer branding

According to data from the 2012 UK Candidate Experience Awards:
• 20% of candidates are existing customers of the organisation they
are applying to,
• 28% would share a positive experience of it with a wider audience
through social media, and 17% would share a negative one.22
Furthermore, a growing emphasis on brand management in the search for talent has
major implications for recruitment consultancies.
Large organisations have to be far more cautious
when choosing the intermediary resourcing bodies
who will represent their brand during the
recruitment process.
BRAND ALIGNMENT
To be truly effective, many businesses have learned that the employer brand must
align closely with a customer brand – brand alignment – if they are to reflect a
consistent message and to ensure the two are not working against each other.
Dr Jill Miller, research adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development
(CIPD) says: “My personal view is that the two are very much interlinked so when
we look at John Lewis adverts on the TV, for example, I get a sub-conscious
understanding of what it must be like to work for John Lewis. There has to be a match
between the employer brand, which can be seen as more an HR element, and the
marketing brand, what the organisation can give to the consumer. If there is not,
there’s the potential for confusing messages being sent out.”
If an employer wants staff to communicate a positive experience, they must live and
breathe the brand, understand what it represents, and be passionate about what
they’re doing, meaning that considerable effort needs to be focused on internal buy-in.
A company’s employees need to be its strongest brand advocates.
This is why highly successful global corporations such as Apple see their brand so
intrinsically woven into everything they do – from the buildings they work in to how
they interact socially.
Dr Jill Miller of the CIPD says: “If marketing does some really fantastic stuff around
your company website and promotion for what it is like to work at the company but
HR isn’t ensuring that internally those messages and that employer brand promise
isn’t being fulfilled there is going to be a mismatch when you get people entering the
organisation.”
It is a philosophy based on deep employee engagement which has become a hot
topic within companies since its importance was recognised officially by the MacLeod
Review of 2010 demonstrating how it can transform performance and profitability.23
Employer branding

The MacLeod Report stated: “We believe that if employee engagement and the principles
that lie behind it were more widely understood, if good practice was more widely shared,
if the potential that resides in the country’s workforce was more fully unleashed, we
could see a step change in workplace performance and in employee well-being, for the
considerable benefit of UK plc.
It believes engagement, going to the heart of the
workplace relationship between employee and
employer, can be a key to unlocking productivity and
to transforming the working lives of many people.24
BRAND ADVOCACY
Brand alignment, therefore, starts with a company’s internal culture, as Ulrich et
al. (2009) pointed out: “Traditional views of organisational culture have one thing in
common; they define culture from the inside-out: who we are, what we do, and how we
do it. We suggest that a more robust and practical approach to leveraging culture is to
identify and shape culture from the outside-in…. In a volatile world of speed and change,
organisations build winning cultures when their culture efforts begin with customers, then
shifts to employee behaviours and organisational processes.” 25
A clearly defined internal culture is key to developing an engaged – and motivated –
workforce and implies that all aspects of company strategy need to be aligned with the
brand, including staff recruitment, development and training.
Natalie Spearing, marketing director of BPS, says: “This means that staff become such
brand advocates it’s almost by osmosis, they are in that environment, they are constantly
being reminded of what the value of the brand is, they live it, they breathe it.
“So if you can get the internal bit right, the external bit works on its own; if you don’t get
the internal bit right, it will never work. It doesn’t work the other way round.”
Dr Jill Miller of the CIPD says: “It’s about making your espoused culture a reality internally
and that’s about fundamentally living and breathing it, making sure the culture you
project outside is your fundamental building block inside and that those two messages
closely align.”
Yet it is precisely this internal dimension of brand power that is often neglected by the
powerfully branded companies. One reason for this is that inculcating brand values into
the culture of a company is no easy task.
Ben Fletcher, professor of personal and organisational development at the University
of Hertfordshire, points to the limitations of existing ways of doing this by making a
distinction between a “true culture” and an “espoused culture”.
Employer branding

Fletcher’s own initiative, Do Something Different (dsd.me), attempts to encourage
behavioural change incrementally by embedding new habits in the way
employees work.
“It’s not a matter of training, education and knowledge – and making sure every
employee can tell you the mission and the values of the company, which is traditionally
what companies have targeted. We know from piles of research that what people say
is not related to how they behave. A true company culture especially with respect to
customers is what employees do, not what mantras they can tell you about what the
company believes in.
“The role of HR should be in this area: to align the espoused values and missions of
the company with the way in which things are happening at the moment, marrying the
surface culture and the underneath culture so that they are one, they are coherent.”
Many organisations focus on their external image and
neglect their internal brand advocacy.
Employer branding

The role of internal culture and brand advocacy among employees becomes particularly
important when it comes to social media.
Staff play an increasingly important marketing role on social media where they are in
direct contact with consumers and may champion a brand through blogging and tweeting
as official and unofficial “brand ambassadors”.
As social media becomes the key destinations for both consumers and employers alike, it
is crucial that the way staff interact with them reflects this cultural alignment.
Social collaboration guru Léon Benjamin, says: “We are seeing companies making big
investments in social tools to make them more attractive to next-generation employees
such as this whole idea of bring your own device – there is a very big drive for companies
to enable people to use their own devices internally to access company applications.
HR are having more and more input into this whole idea of making the workplace more
digital, more attractive, to millennials and next-generation workers.”
Social media offers a huge opportunity in resourcing if used well. Most large corporate
HR teams have programmes that seek to leverage the personal networks of their
employees to find better quality candidates.
Smart, switched on recruitment specialists, particularly in the engineering and design
sectors where there is an acute skills shortage, have instinctively understood this
phenomenon. They have created something that, on the face of it, has got little to do
with recruitment – an expert environment containing everything you want to know about
engineering. A potential candidate, interested in engineering, is naturally attracted to this
community that like-minded people, similarly engaged in the world of engineering, are
also visiting. Creating such a community can complement other digital innovations that
switched-on HR teams are now taking a proactive role in developing.
As workplaces become more digital, some HR teams
have also become more aware that if you don’t
build digital applications internally, that are as easy
as those available externally, then you get less
employee engagement.
Social media

The new proximity of brand and internal culture implies radical organisational reforms
and unforeseen levels of cooperation.
At many businesses HR has hitherto “owned” the internal values while marketing has
retained responsibility for developing and policing the values that the company wants
to project externally to customers – the brand itself.
Yet companies are increasingly realising that for brand and business strategy to be
aligned, the brand can no longer be driven solely by traditional marketing activities.
As brands are ultimately about people, there is a key role for HR in this endeavour –
making it essential that resourcing and marketing teams work closely.
Natalie Spearing of BPS World says: “Undoubtedly there will be purists within a
marketing environment who say this is what the brand is, it can’t change, it has to look
like this, it has to feel like this. But brand developers will confirm that as long as the
DNA remains the same you can use a brand, you can amplify a brand, in different
environments – as long as it doesn’t move away from the key characteristics.”
Dr Jill Miller of the CIPD says: “The organisations that are really getting it right are the
ones that are working across the business. The kind of thing I’ve seen done is, firstly,
if there are those silos, creating some formal links between the two departments, such
as a designated person, a business partner. It also helps to create mutual objectives
so both teams are measured on joint ownership of projects, and that that’s rewarded
across both, because mutual recognition is really important to reinforce this way of
working.”
The brand and its values now become the central criterion of recruitment and HR
functions, shaping the search for employees that meet the expectations of customers
– screening them not just on their technical skills but on their predisposition to interact
well with clients – while driving what the company does internally with existing staff.
Dave Ulrich, professor of business administration at Ross School of Business,
University of Michigan, says: “In this way a company’s self-ascribed identity – to be,
say, the engineering firm providing the best service – filters down into every aspect of
its activity.
“The external desired brand identity outside becomes a driver for all the internal
practices. Service becomes the driving mantra for training programmes, the key
criteria built into the compensation system should be tied to that external identity,
organisational design is structured to vest authority in decision rights based on what
will provide the best service, organised perhaps around customers rather than
around products.”
This role of cultural guardianship vested in HR implies the need for effective
communication strategies based on clear research findings and a well-defined EVP
that is consistent with the corporate identity and branding endeavours.
Organisational reform

Ulrich says there should be a clear “line of sight” between the different facets of a
brand: “You begin generally in the marketplace with the product brand saying ‘Here’s
how our product serves’, and then you shift in the outside world to a firm brand
whereby you want people dedicated to your firm. That firm brand then becomes
the criteria by which you judge culture and that culture should be connected to that
external identity, that what we are known for outside should become what our
values are.”
So how you appear to your customers and the outside
world should be reflected in how your staff and
potential recruits feel about the company.
COLLABORATE TO ACCUMULATE
While it seems clear that the key to the future of resourcing is collaboration with other
sectors of the business, historically HR departments and marketing have not been
comfortable bedfellows, the former often considered more process - and number-
oriented and the latter more creative.
Yet the emphasis on brand is making collaboration more necessary, especially where
the shortage of skills and talent is most acute. There are some innovative examples of
how collaboration is now working in practice (see Case Studies).
Dr Jill Miller of the CIPD says: “The two functions definitely share some common goals,
especially around people on the one hand, and brand on the other, because I think
if we look at the marketing remit they are looking at customers, citizens, community,
employees and so on and then if we look at HR’s remit they are also looking at how
they communicate to customers and community because those people are actually
potential employees.”
Bringing these functions together implies the need for a mutual learning process that
goes both ways and is not just a one-way dialogue in which marketing believes it is
doing something more exciting and HR is there to feed data back into the marketing mix.
It implies the need for changes in both disciplines to build a community that supports
a company’s underlying mission.
This is in line with broader trends in organisational practice that place an emphasis on
collaboration and engagement with staff, an ethic that is at the heart of the Hot Spots
Movement (www.hotspotsmovement.com) founded by Lynda Gratton, a professor at the
London Business School and organisational expert.
Gratton writes: “My research and conversations about the future of work have led me
to understand that the future will be less about general skills and more about in-depth
mastery; less about working as a competitive, isolated individual and more about
working collaboratively in a joined world; and less about focusing solely on a standard
of living and more on the quality of experiences.”26

This form of intelligent collaboration is clearly easier for inspiring young companies or
start-ups building new organisations driving the “purpose economy” that are far more
human-centred, where marketing and HR are intrinsically connected.27
For larger and older companies, however, a silo tradition may require more intentional
efforts to collaborate – and visionary leadership.
There are several obvious areas where greater collaboration between HR (whether
internal or outsourced) and marketing would be particularly fruitful.
A key HR role is cultural alignment – ensuring the
internal culture chimes with the external employer
brand. If marketing conveys core values on a
corporate website through podcasts and videos etc.,
HR needs to ensure that they are driving those values
through the business.

There is no doubt that resourcing is evolving rapidly and engaging closely with other
functions through the business, in particular marketing, with the ultimate outcome
likely to be a form of total immersion in which brand mission is the singular focus of all
activity.
Dave Ulrich and his colleagues, who have published extensively on the collaboration
between HR and marketing, capture this well with the notion of “HR from the outside
in” which is based on the simple premise that “the business of HR is the business”.28
Ulrich says: “The job of a human resources department is to help a company be
successful in the marketplace and it’s not just about administrative work, or functions
of HR, or linking HR strategy. It’s about creating HR practices that will connect to the
outside customers and doing that in a way that is sustainable over time.”
Ben Fletcher believes HR professionals are rapidly realising that they have to add
value to a company in such ways: “If you talk to HR people they can see that things
have to change – what they should be is a facilitator.”
Total immersion in the brand mission implies several long-term changes in how
human resources and recruitment providers work:
• Closer collaboration with marketing;
• A more comprehensive engagement of HR in all the aspects of a company’s
work; and
• Leveraging the personal networks of employees to employ the brand in
recruitment and employee engagement.
Marrying marketing: The first implication of total immersion is a much closer
collaboration with marketing in which the emphasis of HR’s role shifts from
employer brand sharpening recruitment to a much broader role of internal
brand advocacy.
Natalie Spearing of BPS World says: “It’s a bigger process than just employer brand.
Generally employer brand will be both internal and external just by the nature of
having to attract people. From an employer brand perspective it’s going out there to
find young engineers, people who are just graduating, first job etc. We take the DNA of
the brand and we try to amplify it and make it relevant to being able to try and attract
those people.
“The internal side of it is very much about brand advocacy, getting people within the
business to become advocates of the brand so they live the values – they talk to other
people about how great it is to be in the company.”
The key underlying process is the convergence of internal and external identities –
whereby the internal culture truly reflects and shapes the external identity.
Conclusion: total immersion

Professor Dave Ulrich says: : “Historically the external identity and the internal culture
have been done separately; people are starting to connect the two, they are saying
the logic would be that you have a product brand, the level below that is a firm brand
that gives me an identity, and then going further that firm brand should create the
internal culture, that internal culture then should create a leadership brand and that
leadership brand should then create an employee brand. So there should be a line of
sight all the way from the product to the employer, and the brand metaphor is simply
the identity, reputation and image – and that image should be consistent all the
way through.”
Collaborative working with resourcing and recruitment consultancies aiming to
enhance the core brand of a client was also a recommendation of REC’s major
research project into the future of the jobs market.29
This stated: “Where HR and recruitment agencies are committed to collaborative
working and developing and maintaining close relationships, the outcome for both
parties is more positive. From a strategic perspective it is the formation of these
stronger partnerships that brings mutual business benefits and added value.”30
Anita Holbrow of the REC says there are important consequences of this evolution for
the recruitment industry that require them above all to live and breathe the customer’s
brand, ethics, direction and beliefs. The recruitment partner must understand the
brand intrinsically – but also be dedicated to enhancing it.
Anita continues: “A corporate client is not going to invest in a partner after it has
invested billions in making sure that it looks like the employer of choice – it’s
not going to risk that with any old supplier, a third-party intermediary that cannot
demonstrate that it first of all understands the client intimately, and secondly, that it is
squeaky clean in terms of how it conducts its business and its affairs.
“That’s the 21st-century equation: there’s no talent so how am I going to get it? I’ve
got to meet with the mindset of the candidates, I’ve got to be the best employer, the
employer of choice, and to do that I’ve go to make sure my brand is the best it can
possibly be. It’s a very exciting dynamic for anybody involved in this.”
Innovative resourcing agencies such as BPS World have instinctively understood this
new responsibility, weaving into their recruitment and retention strategy detailed brand
consultancy and using their in-house Brand Performance Studio to create a unique
proposition that enhances a client’s reputation and so maximises their reach.
• Extending through the line: A second implication of total immersion is a much more
comprehensive engagement of HR in all the aspects of a company’s work that extends
into every operational area.
Living and breathing the brand and extending HR functions mean that collaboration,
whether in-house or outsourced, has to be more comprehensive than just cooperating
with marketing and has to extend to finance, training and business intelligence.

Natalie Spearing of World BPS says the role of recruitment experts is now extending all
the way along the line: “You go in and undertake consultancy, then you look at their
brand, then look at what the recruitment solution is, then getting retention strategies right,
thinking about people and culture, the benefits you bring to a business, and then business
intelligence which is the measurement tool really to allow the business to see how people
are functioning.”
Removing the walls between departments envisages an evolution of HR into a competence
staffed by people with marketing and other skillsets who are simultaneously recruiting,
training, influencing and engaging – a form of “people” or “human-to-human
resourcing” department.
As the REC (2013) says: “Employers want to trust the agencies they work with so that
recruiters can properly inhabit the role of brand ambassador and take the employer
brand to the market. Successful recruiters are embracing this new way of working and
realise that they have to go beyond just a transactional relationship with their clients. Good
recruitment is a professional service, offering market intelligence, benchmarking and the
latest and most sophisticated methods of engaging and selecting talent.”31
This new approach requires a new shared language of business that breaks down the fixed
operational categories and organisational definitions of the past, placing in their stead a
simpler loyalty to brand success – a more strategic mindset to drive the business forward.
Anita Holbrow of the REC says: “Very few businesses don’t rely on people, even ones with
a high-technology input, so I see the HR function morphing into becoming the business
enablement department or specialists, because you need to enable a business to be
successful through people. This is enablement through brand, it’s enablement through
channel management, it’s enablement through all manner of different things that are going
to make sure that candidates are the best and they hire the best and keep the best.”
• Mastering the network: A final implication of total immersion is that a key role of HR will
be leveraging the personal networks of employees to employ the brand in recruitment and
to make a company more digitally friendly for next-generation staff.
Employee engagement is likely to become more intimately related to the possibilities
offered by digital technology and social networking: to improve engagement, companies
need to be better connected to employees and to provide them with better tools
and processes.
The explosion of digital channels providing data is already having a dramatic impact
on marketing, whereby evolving consumer habits and new pressures on a marketing
department to help grow the business are redefining this discipline as well.
The marketing department of 2020 will be unrecogniseable from today’s advertising,
branding, demand generation, field marketing, product marketing, partner marketing, and
communications teams, and will be founded on data emanating from digital touchpoints.
At the heart of its role will be brand stories that focus on creating emotional connections
for consumers based on a business’s “higher purpose”.

According to the International; Data Corporation (IDC), a global marketing analyst, by
2020 the marketing function in leading companies will be radically reshaped into three
organisational “systems” – content, channels, and consumption (data).32
An excellent example of HR’s unfolding role can be found in the internal platform (“Shift”)
created by the cement multinational CEMEX as part of what it calls the “collaboration
revolution”. It explained its purpose thus: “Shift is ultimately designed for a new kind
of workforce, one that is mobile, global, and empowered. By building a collaboration
platform accessible to employees throughout the company and around the world, CEMEX
is empowering employees in new and important ways that go beyond traditional titles
and roles. With Shift, CEMEX creates a global platform for a global company and a
global workforce. When the promise is collaboration, the benefit for employees is greater
satisfaction in the work they do and the value they provide.”33
Social collaboration guru Leon Benjamin says: “The new 21st-century role of HR
is connectivity – so quite a lot of the internal initiatives to deploy Facebook-style
communication platforms internally are driven by HR.”
HR and recruiters now have an opportunity take
a leading position in the development of the
“collaboration revolution”.
Skills shortages are driving new approaches to recruitment and brand can become the
essential differentiator for potential employees when choosing who to work for.
Today the brand is synonymous with a company’s internal culture and, to be effective,
many businesses have learned that the employer brand must align closely with a
customer-facing brand. Brand alignment of this kind requires significant attention to a
company’s internal culture and the extent to which that reflects its values.
A clearly defined internal culture implies that all aspects of company strategy need to
be aligned with the brand, including staff recruitment, development and training. This
becomes particularly important as social media has become a key destination for both
consumers and employers alike.
The new proximity of brand and internal culture implies radical organisational reforms and
much greater cooperation – making it essential that HR and marketing teams work closely.
Bringing these functions together implies the need for a mutual learning process and the
ultimate outcome is likely to be a form of total immersion in which brand mission is the
singular focus of all resourcing activity.
Total immersion in the brand mission implies key changes in how human resources and
recruitment providers work:
• closer collaboration with marketing;
• a more comprehensive engagement of HR in all the aspects of a company’s work;
• and leveraging the personal networks of employees.

Case Study Zyxel – Taiwanese owned internet and telecommunications network hardware company
Lee Marsden, Head of Europe
Employs 150 people in Europe and 600 worldwide
Clients in the UK and Ireland include Post Office, Zen Internet and Eircom
Zyxel had a problem. The company had a great story to tell about the work it did but that wasn’t coming through to the
talent they wanted to come and work for them. Once a potential recruit had reached the interview stage he/she was
bowled over but getting anyone to apply was hard work.
Lee Marsden, Head of Europe, says the problem was that most people didn’t know what they did.
“They thought we were one of the many Asian companies in the internet/communications industry interested in low
cost and high volume. They didn’t realise we have our own research and development in house. They didn’t realise we
work on products and features designed specifically for our customers and there is plenty of opportunity to do
this work.”
Once the potential recruits were sat in front of the interview panel and Zyxel was given the chance to tell its story
the company found there was a real interest in coming to work for them. But because they didn’t know the story
beforehand it wasn’t easy to get them there in the first place.
Lee decided a change was needed to get the “best kept secret in the industry” out into the open. We needed to let
people outside know what those of us inside knew.
Two new appointments were made. Head of marketing and head of human resources. Rather than marketing looking
externally and HR looking internally, the ethos was that both should work together internally and externally.
This meant HR should see how marketing could help “sell” the company ethos, work ethic and values to potential
recruits. Marketing could help “sell” the brand internally too.
The first step was to rebrand Zyxel. No senior managers were involved. The floor was given over to the staff who
worked with an external consultant to discuss the values and give an insight into what the company meant to them.
With that rebranding in place the next move was to change the way they recruit.
Lee said: “ You can teach people the skills and knowledge. What you can’t teach is attitudes and habit. We use KASH
– Knowledge, Attitude, Skills and Habits – in our recruitment process now. People can no longer tell us how good they
are, they have to tell us about how they have handled a situation and in doing so demonstrate those skills.”
These competency based interviews are particularly useful when it is hard to select on the basis of technical merit. For
example a graduate job where relevant experience is less important or not required. The interviews can give valuable
insights into an individual’s preferred style of working and help predict behaviours in future situations.
The change for Zyxel is ongoing and at the early stages but Lee has no doubt it is paying off. He believes his mix of
marketing and HR internally and externally will move the company from being under the radar to being on the radar
and that will attract and retain the best talent in the business.
Case Study - 1.

Case Study Caledonian Life Insurance – part of Royal London which owns 8 businesses in pensions,
investment and asset management including Scottish Life and Scottish Provident.
Jon Glen Managing Director Caledonian Life based in Dublin
Royal London Group employs 2,900 people in UK and Ireland
Being a well-known company on a beautiful and friendly island has its advantages when it comes to hiring staff. It may
be wet and windy sometimes but the charms of an office in Dublin are undeniable.
The problem is that Ireland is a small place and insurance is a small world so new staff generally come from similar
companies in the country. Nothing wrong with that but competing with five other insurance and pensions businesses
hasn’t been easy for Caledonian Life – especially when competitors include big brands like Zurich and Aviva.
Jon Glen, Managing Director of Caledonian Life in Dublin said it was time to look again at how they recruited staff and
what they were offering. When the company became part of the Royal London Group three years ago, the time was
right for change.
Jon said: “Our whole approach to recruitment has been changing over the last few years. We have taken on a recruitment
company that now looks after the whole process for the Group. In the past each business within the Group had its own
HR teams which used a variety of different recruitment suppliers sometimes leading to a disjointed approach.
“Now we have one recruitment company, based in the UK which means we always look at hiring staff from within the
Group as well as externally.”
But bringing the HR function and recruitment together was not the only change the business decided to make to
ensure it attracted and retained the staff necessary to grow. Marketing was crucial too as becoming part of a bigger
group is giving Caledonian Life the visibility to compete with the better known brands in the Irish industry.
Jon said: “Branding is becoming more important in all industries and Insurance is no exception. Historically, one of
the recruitment challenges for Caledonian Life was whether people had heard of us and whether they believed we
would remain in the market against the larger, better known players. So being a recognised brand helps in every way,
including recruitment. Caledonian is much more well known now, because of our growth and PR activities and also
because we are now part of the Royal London Group. Being part of a bigger brand means there is more time to look
at the whole business and focus on an approach which includes more learning and development and performance
management.”
The Royal London Group now has a brand expert on the board. A major advertising campaign has begun and even the
décor in all the offices is being changed to reflect the fact that Caledonian Life and the other companies in the group
have the same style and standards. The feel is very much one of being part of a bigger organisation which ultimately, it
is believed, will help attract the right staff.
Jon said: “HR and marketing are separate functions but there are much stronger links now as there is much stronger
communication and it is more aligned to the brand. At a board level there is a much closer link between the brand
team and the people team.
“It is early days but it is starting to pay off in terms of the sort of person we are now recruiting. At a senior level we have
started to attract people who we would not have been able to five years ago, which is a very positive development.”
Case Study - 2.

TOTAL IMMERSION - RESOURCING THAT LIVES AND BREATHES THE BRAND
Gilead Sciences specialises in medicines for people with life-threatening diseases, and is growing rapidly. For
potential employees wanting to work in these disease areas, Gilead Sciences was well-known and recognised as a
leader in the field.
However, as it has expanded its work in Liver Disease and Oncology, the business has had to compete for staff with
bigger pharmaceutical companies working in similar areas of medicine.
In the past, like so many companies, Gilead Sciences would simply advertise its jobs and anticipate applications
or use third party agencies. The problem facing Gilead Sciences was that this approach didn’t always get them the
talent with the skills they needed. Headhunting didn’t help either because people would question why they would
want to leave an established player in the disease area to join a smaller company like Gilead Sciences.
Grant Weinberg, Director of Talent Acquisition EMEA said, “The company decided to adopt innovative recruitment
strategies to attract the right people. This meant reconsidering how the business engaged with talent. We began
highlighting not only our products but our innovative research and development in new therapeutic areas.”
Grant said: “What we had to do was go out and engage in conversations where people were talking about our
research, science and products for example at industry conferences. That is where opinions were formed, thought
leadership took place, technical connections were made and where peers were talking to peers, building
the network.
“This is a typical recruitment ground, the chance to get the message out about your company and most importantly
about the things that you do. It is that which attracts people. The fact that if you work in the field of HIV/AIDS, Liver
disease and Oncology then Gilead Sciences is the company that you should have an interest in working for.”
LinkedIn also plays a big part in recruitment as does Twitter, Grant uses both platforms to further communicate
Gilead Sciences’ publically available scientific data.
He said: “If you are connected to Gilead Sciences you will know more than the average person about what the
company researches and commercialises. Also by making our public domain research data open to our target
talent, it means that talent entering the field of academia with a focus on Life Sciences, will have heard of us
already. This could influence their future career choices in favour of a career at Gilead Sciences.
Grant said the evolving approach to these talent channels is beginning to pay off. but Grant and his team continue
to search for the right talent. “As our hiring community includes scientists, medics, accountants, lawyers etc. we
have the ability to speak the candidate’s language at the interview. They can ask the technical questions and the
interviewer has the knowledge to give them what they need. They are already speaking the same language even
before they accept the job.”
Case Study - 3.
Case Study Gilead Sciences Inc - a leading research-based biopharmaceutical company which discovers,
develops and commercialises innovative medicines in life-threatening diseases.
Grant Weinberg – Director, Talent Acquisition EMEA
Employs about 1,800 people in Europe, Middle East and Australia

Case Study AMCo – pharmaceutical company based in London provides niche essential medicines for
patients across the world.
John Cowell – Human Resources Director
Employs 140 people in the UK and Ireland and 350 worldwide.
When a company like AMCo is recruiting it has the whole world to choose from. AMCO’s continued growth has resulted
in sales in 110 countries from the UK to Australia.
But as a business, which provides the niche medicines which are essential for small groups of patients, it still has to
compete against the bigger pharmaceutical companies who may be household names.
In the past, like other companies in the sector, recruitment would have relied on the more traditional methods like
adverts in newspapers, magazines or on the internet. But when it came to filling roles for this fast-growing company,
AMCo decided to make a change.
John Cowell, Director of Human Resources, said: “AMCo’s growth in recent years has meant we’ve had to recruit a lot
of highly skilled people very quickly. We’ve tried new ways of doing this, including using our own website portal for HR
and by more word of mouth recruitment. We’ve been delighted by the number and quality of applicants we’ve received
in this way. We’ve recruited a number of people through LinkedIn and we are now moving into social media more as a
result of the response.
“We offer young professionals the chance to have a voice rather than being lost in a big and anonymous company.
There are lots of motivated people out there wanting the chance to work in a dynamic company. These people want to
be given real responsibility. By being active in places where they look for work, typically LinkedIn, it gives them a better
idea of what it means to be part of the AMCo team.”
In the past working for a big pharma company would have meant job security. That isn’t necessarily what today’s
applicants want. It isn’t all about money either.
John said: “One of the things we can offer new recruits, which other companies can’t, is the chance to work in different
offices across the world. Some applicants ask us if they can take time off at some point in their career to travel.
However, when they discover they can have work placements or travel to our offices across the world, it becomes a
win/win situation for them. They get to experience a different culture and they are being paid for it!”
Examples include staff who have come from the company’s offices in Mumbai to work in London. Another employee is
shortly to transfer to the new Dubai office that AMCo is opening in October 2014.
Of the 350 employees for AMCo the company has more than 25 nationalities working for them. It all adds to the rich
mix of experiences for all staff members old and new.
John said: “Many have joined us from abroad, relocating from places like Spain and Italy for the opportunity to work
with us. These recruits are ambitious, dynamic and creative and it is great to have people with those qualities working
in our company.
Case Study - 4.

1
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2
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3
Groom, Brian. 2014b. “Lack of engineers threatens UK recovery, say industrialists”, FT.com, 16 March
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[accessed July 2014]
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Engineering Employers Federation (EEF). 2014a. “One million manufacturing workers needed, but
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Skills, April 2014. London: EEF
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Confederation (REC), page 27
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Minchington, Brett. 2013. “In employer branding it’s what you measure that counts!”, 12 May 2013,
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notes

14
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15
Robert Walters. 2012. “Managing your brand throughout the recruitment process”
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Stump, Maryann. 2014. “How do strong brands affect talent recruitment?”
19
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20
Robert Walters. 2012. “Managing your brand throughout the recruitment process”
21
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Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC)
22
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MacLeod, David and Clarke, Nita. 2010. Engaging for Success, page 3
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27
See: Hurst, Aaron. 2014. The Purpose Economy: How your desire for impact, personal growth and
community is changing the world. Elevated Press
28
Ulrich, Dave, Younger, Jon, Brockbank, Wayne and Ulrich, Mike. 2012. “Next Generation HR”, Chapter 1
in HR from the Outside In. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill Professional
notes

29
REC. 2009. Gateway to Success: Recruitment 2020
30
REC. 2009. Gateway to Success: Recruitment 2020, page 27
31
REC. 2013. The Client Paradox
32
IDC. 2013. “IDC Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) 2014 Predictions: The Emergence of the Chief 14
‘Something-or-Other’,” web conference, 17 December 2013. Framingham, MA: IDC. See: http://www.idc.
com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24541813 [accessed July 2014]
33
CEMEX. 2010. The Collaboration Revolution. CEMEX White Paper, May 2010. Available online at: http://
www.cemex.com/whatisshift/docs/CEMEXShiftWP_The_Collaboration_Revolution.pdf [accessed July 2014]
notes

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