International Human Resource Management Issues in Recruitment: A Case Study of Unilever

7International and Comparative
Human Resource Management

Executive Summary
The organization in focus in this report is Unilever. Unilever Plc is a multinational, British
company, known for their good-quality and sustainable consumer goods. The company owns
over 400 brands under its name. Its products are available in over 190 countries. The IHRM
(International Human Resource management) focus area chosen for this report is Recruitment.
Recruitment is the process of identifying, hiring and on-boarding skilled individuals. Unilever
receives over 1.8 million job applications in a year. Out of which, it recruits only 30,000. To
make this task easy, they use AI technology developed by Pymetrics (Marr, 2020). Secondary
sources has been used to analyse data. In the process of recruitment, Unilever faces IHRM issues
such as hiring and on-boarding a diverse workforce, technological challenges that arise from an
increased use of AI and other issues that arise from a lack of human interface. The report goes on
to recommend ways to deal with such IHRM challenges and aligning the recruitment process
with the UN SDGs of fairness, equity, efficiency and responsible government.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary.........................................................................................................................2
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................4
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................4
Methodology................................................................................................................................4
Findings........................................................................................................................................5
Recommendations to resolve the IHRM issues:..........................................................................8
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................9
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................11

INTRODUCTION
Unilever is a multinational British customer products organization that is situated in UK
and provides various products such as food, condiments etc. (Muisyo and et.al, 2021) The
mission of organization is to add vitality to live by satisfying needs and desires of consumers.
Organization values are diversified in several ways such as integrity, respect and duties. In this
determines IHRM practices and effectiveness involved by organization that is recruiting
exercises by hiring employees in business that helps in growing organization effectively. The
topic of this report that focuses on key issues and emergence is recruitment, in which signifies
issues for hiring people and also derives positive impact by findings that conducts positive
approach by hiring potential peoples in organization. Also, occurs negative approach on business
that develops issue for organization as determines due to different elements such as lack of trust,
reduce productivity etc. that influences operation of Unilever that impacts on organization
productivity.
MAIN BODY
Methodology
The process of collecting data so that it could be measured and analyzed to produce
useful information, is known as Data Collection. There mainly two ways of collecting data and
the data collected by these methods is known as Primary data and Secondary data. Primary Data
is the data that is collected at the source. This is the original data that has not been published
before. Being original data, this is more authentic and reliable. Primary data can be collected by
the means of conducting surveys, performing experiments or via a direct communication with
people. Through conducting both research on basis of data assessment conducts effective
approach by of organization function in systematic manner. Secondary data is the data that has
been in existence for a while. Using secondary data means using the data that was collected by
someone else. It can be either published data or unpublished data. Published data includes
government publication, technical journals, trade journals, historical documents, business
reports, etc. Unpublished data includes blogs, letters, diaries, etc. The data used for making this
report is strictly secondary data. No original data was conducted for the purpose of this report.