Unilever Case Study: Talent Management, Sustainability & Leadership

This assignment provides a detailed analysis of Unilever's talent management strategies, focusing on their 'People, Place, and Performance' HR vision and the 'Unilever Sustainable Living Plan'. It explores the importance of mid and long-term market forecasts and HR needs, crucial information for human capital analysis, and procedures for identifying and recruiting talent. The role of leadership in Unilever is examined, emphasizing attributes like being a role model, inspirer, enabler, and achiever. The case study further discusses the importance of maintaining a consistent storyline while adapting to different national cultures and evaluates the talent recruitment process in Egypt, comparing it to non-Arab nations. Finally, it assesses the applicability of Unilever's approach to smaller organizations and proposes a talent management strategy for a small Unilever competitor, focusing on strategic hiring, skill enhancement, and continuous performance evaluation. This comprehensive analysis provides insights into Unilever's integrated approach to talent management and sustainability.

Talent Management
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Task 1: How Unilever People Place and Performance HR vision works
Unilever aims at creating a platform and culture where their employees are endowed at act
like entrepreneurs and business owners. The analytical approach adopted by the company
has assisted it to reach the new and innovative level of transparency both internally as well
as externally on all the levels i.e. corporate level and people based level. Regarding to
corporate paybacks, Unilever has been unambiguous in stating its major targets in the public
then reporting grip against them (Cavusgil, Tamer, Pervez, Ghauri, and Akcal).
There are three major goals of the Unilever Sustainable Living plan i.e. to enhance the
health and wellbeing of the customers and its employees, decrease the impact of
environmental issues and uplift livelihoods. Assisting all the goals helps in better
performance of social, environmental and economic issues across the entire value chain.
Unilever also aims at adopting talent strategy which integrate the compass strategy as well.
Maintaining people, place and performance is one of the challenge which aims at how to
protect the best talent, how to provide best work place and how to make people perform best
to gain productive outcomes. Unilever has successfully accepted the three fold challenge
and created platform which will best satisfy the company as well as its potential customers
(Grant and Robert).
Task 2:
Part 1: Importance to focus on mid and long term market forecast and HR needs
It is very crucial for senior management, including HR management, to focus on mid and
long-term market forecasts and human resource needs because of the painful boom-and-bust
cycle of the budget cuts and rapid growth. The boom and bust phases are really complex
phase to manage because it all depends on analyzing and evaluating the market in a more
precise form (Chakravarthy, Bala, and Coughlan).
Managing the needs of HR is not as simple as it seems to be. It is all about adding
supplementary value to the company. Analyzing the needs of HR helps to improve the
productivity in an organization by recruiting potential candidates who can generate benefits
to the company and get the vision and mission achieved. In addition to this, it also helps to
reduce the unnecessary costs incurred by the company. Moreover, it build up the brand and

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create the best place to work by engaging more productive employees in it. The senior
management must emphasis on the mid and long term market forecast by facilitating
strategy execution. This can easily be done by increasing the performance of the employees
and preparing employees for long term targets (Farndale, Elaine, Scullion, and Sparrow, pp.
161-168).
Part 2: Crucial information included in the analysis of human capital to cover foreseeable
gaps
While analyzing the human capital in order to reduce the foreseeable gaps, huge amount of
time has been spent to evaluate whether the talent engine can sustain 80 billion euro revenue
business or not. Talent are analyzed based of the type of people, quantity and quality and
evaluating the gaps in order to reduce such gaps as well. The company is trying to keep a
track record of all the activities involved in all the areas of the company. The company also
aims at examining the skills, talent and culture to recognize if it have what it takes to be 80
billion euro business the company want to be (Beek, Maarten, and Grachev).
In addition to this, it is one of the major responsibilities of a Human resource to reduce the
gaps found in skills, talent and culture which may damage 80 billion euro aspirations across
the entire business. Dynamic human capital gap analysis and planning aims at providing an
opportunity to create healthy succession planning process for any business in order to
operate successfully. Human capital gap analysis is very pertinent only when the skills of
the employees are battered, applied and answerable (Kenett, Ron and Raanan).
Part 3: procedure to identify existing talent and tools used to recruit new talent
The company’s 70% talent in built and the remaining 30% of talent is bought. The company
focuses on the marketing oriented strategy so that their marketing expertise is leveraged to
assist building their employees in terms of being a good place to work along with good
people and a winning business. An innovative authentic leadership programme with an
inexorable emphasis on assuring the talent under development is united with the upcoming
strategy and underpinning business model of the company is being planned by the company
in order to recruit new talent. But the company with such huge operating activities need a
great and tremendous diversified marketing strategy and talent. Making the use of analytics
will assist the company to sense-check crucial messages in several market places while

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upholding the similar underscoring value proposal behind the company predominant brand
(Kim, Chan, and Mauborgne). Moreover, the company activate their same story in different
way based on the location. The essentials of the brand is still but the new talents are
recruited and activates using analytical tools.
The company also recruits 850 graduates from 45 markets at a time and the company stands
on the top three employers among 37countries. The company focuses on the quality of the
hiring and attractiveness of the brand which is highly measurable.
Task 3:
Part 1: Role of leadership in Unilever and its attributes
Leadership plays a crucial role in any organization because it helps to control the overall
activities of the company and ensure to achieve the objectives, mission and vision of the
company and also gain competitive advantage in the market. Similarly, the company also
aims at creating a new authentic leadership programme which will emphasize on aligning
the overall strategy of the company (Morton, Josh, Wilson, and Cooke).
Managers are people who do things right, while leaders are people who do the right thing.
— Warren Bennis.
In other words, leadership can be defined as those who set direction for others and support
themselves and others to do the right thing by creating and developing a vision and mission
and encouraging one to achieve the mission and vision (Schein).
There are four major attributes of leadership which include:
Role model: Demonstrate unity, assist people, learner, live values and lead by
example
Inspirer: Create a vision, motivate people, and inspire others to take risks
Enabler: Empower and support others to grow, create team and maintain
collaborative relationships, generate synergies
Achiever: Emphasis on outcomes, create better opportunities and learn from
feedback

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Part 2: Importance of maintaining the same storyline but adapting it to the different national
culture based on location
Unilever aims at maintaining the same story line. The company has a very ambitious vision
to wholly decouple its overall growth from environmental footprint and enhance its
optimistic impact by Sustainable living plan which helps the company to uphold the same
story line across the globe no matter what location is it (Urip).
Relationships are very powerful and when it comes to adapting different culture is quite
difficult task to do. However, one to one connection in other countries is the major
foundations for change. Maintaining relationships with people from dissimilar cultures is
prime in building diverse communities which are powerful enough to gain major goals and
objectives of the company. The company has adopted several culture with the same story
line and gained successful business growth as well. Powerful alignment of business with
social interest and planning to grow in long term is one of the best way to gain longevity
and success. So, it hardly matters to shift the story line when the company plans to adopt
new cultures and new location unless the company has the strong mission and objectives
that must drive the business to gain competitive advantages ( Galpin, Timothy, Whitttington,
and Bell, pp. 1-17).
Part 3: Recruiting talent for Egypt and determining whether it works for non-Arab nations as
well.
Recruitment is defined as the process of finding and hiring the best person that can be inside
or outside the organization in the most effective way. The whole process of recruitment
involves analyzing the needs of a job, attracting employees towards the particular job,
screening and choosing candidates, and combining the fresh candidate to the company. The
process of recruitment remains almost same in Egypt as well. The candidates in Egypt are
hired based on the talent programs held by the company (Kauser, Saleema, and Tlaiss, pp. 35-
56). There are several competencies addressed in such programs such as technical
competencies, financial competencies, managerial competencies, and leadership
competencies. The main objective of recruiting such talent is to attract fresh candidate
towards the management by creating core competencies that will help them to gain optimal

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performance. In addition to this, the chosen candidate will be given chance to take part in
rotational programs which will boost their strategic expertise in the related field. Later,
ongoing development plan is also held which will boost the talent in a candidate to work
more effectively and gain the desired set goals (Campbell, Andrew, Renshaw, and Engstrom,
pp 344-351).
The recruitment talent in Egypt is not similar to Non-Arab nations because more than 40%
of the Arab’s region is unemployed and Major Arab stated had gained a net tertiary
enrolment rate of over 30% and they are unsuccessful in introducing suitable value chain of
job vacancies needed to engross the scattering pool of graduates. The Arab nations are not
able to address the socio-economic needs more wisely and this has created unemployment
issues rising at 12%. However, such situation does not exists in Non-Arab nations
(Jureidini).
Task 4:
Part 1: Analyzing whether Unilever approach can be used by smaller and less global
organization or not
The approach used by the company can easily be used by smaller as well as less global
organizations because the company focuses on the sustainable living plans. Today there are
huge number of SME’s which aims at being environment friendly and they make huge
efforts to remain competitive in the market (Waters, Donald, and Rinsler). This will not only
create a positive feedback for the company but also generate financial benefits for long
term. According to numerous results, it can be stated that sustainability is the mother lode of
company and technological innovations which produce bottom-line and top-line return.
Being environment friendly reduces additional costs because companies end up diminishing
the inputs they utilize. Moreover, the procedure creates supplementary revenues from better
products and help companies to introduce innovative business as well. Truly, bec ause these
are the objectives of corporate innovation, many small and less global organizations also
treat sustainability as part of innovation’s new frontier (Bratton, John, and Jeff Gold).
Part 2: Talent Management approach for a small Unilever competitor
Frictional Competitor name (United Solutions)

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United solution, being a small Unilever competitor will recruit new and innovative talented
candidates based on the required skills and knowledge. The hiring must be done at the right
time by choosing the right candidate for the right job position. The job description and job
specification must be aligned with each other so that the person hired will get an
opportunity to enhance their skills in respective field. After defining the appropriate job
description and job specifications, the company will follow the recruitment process step by
step (Sparrow, Paul, Hird, and Cooper pp. 177-212). Once the candidate gets selected, the
company will create a platform where the hired candidate will get an opportunity to deliver
effective input along with desired outputs. The hired candidate will be able to showcase
their skills based on the knowledge and performance. In addition to this, the company will
also monitor and evaluate the talents on specific interval and feedback must be given to each
employees because feedback helps to create a sense of responsibility towards a particular
work. Thus, united solution uses an innovative talent management approach to hire a new
candidate for the company (Hatum).

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