Shell UK combines HR and marketing to sell the brand

For an organisation ranked fifth in Marketing Week's Most Valuable UK Brands list 2009, 16th in The Times' Top 100 Graduate Employers list and cited as a 'Top 10 Graduate Brand' by the FT, it is a big surprise to hear Shell's Navjot Singh describe the past few years with the words: "I didn't think we had a good brand".

But the bigger surprise is still to come. This time, though, it's less what he says, but who he actually is. This is his job title: global marketing manager, recruitment and global HR communications manager, Shell (UK). "I report to the VP of recruitment, the VP of HR strategy and the exec VP for communications," Singh says, attempting to clarify the role. "Put more simply, it's HR and marketing together. I'm 50% a marketer; the rest is HR, communications and recruitment," He pauses. "But I'm an HR person really."

This is not the first time Singh, former marketing director of Daimler Chrysler, has had to explain this outwardly confusing role. He originally joined Shell as a VP of customer relationship management, but joined the HR team when one of them said something that struck a chord - 'wouldn't it be good if we could market our careers in the same way we market our lubricants?' Today Singh is literally a one-off, pushing the boundaries of traditional HR practice, by fusing marketing principles into everything it now does.

"I don't want our HR people to be deep-rooted marketing professionals - that's not my intention," says Singh. "But what I want them to understand are the common tools, the language and techniques marketers use that have a direct impact on HR's ability to do its job. The marketing department at Shell actually sits in the HR department - this is a real innovation. Shell's HR team all have a more rounded way of thinking about how they get talent. I believe this is a first that an HR department is under the nose, and to some extent in charge, of marketing. It's a completely different way of thinking."

Singh makes what he has achieved sound simple. The reality has been a six-year project. What he first found, when he joined Shell in 2003, was a marketing and HR team at odds with each other. Shell had 37 separate recruitment marketing agencies and none knew what the other was doing. "We'd literally have university students telling us we had more than one stand at the same campus recruitment fare. We didn't realise this ourselves. It was embarrassing, and was putting out different, confusing messages," says Singh.

There was a business as well as intellectual incentive to change things. Retiring engineers meant Shell needed to double the number of new recruits it hired from 2,697 in 2005 to 5,440 by 2006 and to more than treble it by 2008. Singh says it was only by educating HR about marketing and the employer brand that the business would have any chance of success. "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," he says.

Singh has spearheaded a programme called Shell 'xchange' - literally an education process for HR professionals in marketing skills development for non-marketing specialists, co-developed with marketing agency Brand Learning. It has involved educating a population of more than 800 HR professionals in total, and Singh says the thrust of it was getting HR and marketing to learn the very different language each other used, because behind this the two departments actually already do very similar things.

"Marketing wants to 'target consumers', and HR really does the same thing - target potential employees - but each has a different way of describing it," says Singh "What's certainly clear is that jobseekers don't regard the two as being different. They see both as targeting, and they want to be targeted, with a clear and consistent message."

Unbelievably, Shell did not have a single brand message suitable for both consumers and potential employees. Now it does, supported with a number of joint marketing/HR toolkits - such as a recruitment planning toolkit, and an online advertisement creation resource, where HR professionals can access the same marketing images, collateral and messages appropriate for their markets, to produce recruitment ads consistent with the marketing department's view. But a cross-pollination of techniques has happened too. "We've brought marketing planning excellence into HR at Shell," says Singh. "HR didn't often know where its customers - that is, candidates - were. If this were a marketing problem, the marketing department would embark on a market-research and media- planning exercise. These same principles now exist in HR."

The most striking example of this, says Singh, was when HR conducted the sort of typical research project the marketing department would do to try and identify where its customers (candidates) would be. A shock discovery was that a high percentage of engineering students (the type of recruits) all used the same airport and even a specific airport lounge when travelling. As such, HR embarked on a micro-level recruitment drive in just one single departure lounge, leaving recruitment leaflets for candidates to pick up. This guerrilla-style marketing tactic would not have occurred otherwise. "We now know we source 85% of our talent from just 10 key talent markets," says Singh.

He adds: "We have been on a journey; it's less a specific process (although Brand Learning has orchestrated events), but more of a journey to find out how marketing principles can contribute to an HR objective," says Singh. "In the past, HR could have been putting in a lot of good effort, but much of it could have been going to waste. Now I believe we've moved from being a reactive recruiter to a proactive one."

Other innovations have included a thorough review and redesign of the online recruitment process, so as to provide a better customer journey with all the right marketing messages along the way. The wait from final assessment to job offer has now been cut from 81 days in 2007 to 39 last year. In the past three years, targets for attracting graduates have been exceeded by a minimum of more than 11%. Candidate experience scores have been raised from 3.55 out of 5 in 2006 to 3.7 in 2008.

But the ultimate sign of how well marketing and HR have been integrated is the following significant fact: 20% of the (mainly HR-focused) recruitment marketing team have been promoted to other, more pure marketing roles. "From a marketing sense, HR is creating best value," says Singh. "We think we're changing the HR recruitment paradigm. Marketing and HR need to be joined up; the two are intrinsically linked."