Listening to Shell - Marketing Interview 

As the Dutch oil company reports record profits, Venetia Howes, head of brand strategy implementation and Nimai Swaroop, recruitment marketing manager from Shell, were interviewed by Think.

Here’s the full transcript.

As consumers become increasingly aware of environmental issues, your employees are also citizens. How do you ensure Shell attracts the best calibre of graduates?

Nimai Swaroop, recruitment marketing manager:

As one of the world’s leading petrochemical and energy companies we operate at the cutting edge of technology. Today, energy demands continue to rise and new energy challenges require creative thinking in the fields of science and technology, plus an understanding of environmental concerns. As such we require the best people to get the job done.

Recruitment plays a key role in generating talent to fuel the needs for our businesses and therefore across Europe we actively search for this talent by partnering with universities and organisations alike.

People remain our greatest asset and we focus huge efforts on personal development of staff by creating a win-win partnership with employees in identifying their development needs and building their careers.

They will have a good academic record, naturally. But we’ll also assess their ability to analyse problems, deliver results and work effectively with others. We look for qualities such as their capacity to absorb and analyse information, their drive to deliver results, ability to work within a team and technical competencies for more technical roles.

However honesty, integrity and respect for people remain at the heart of our culture.

These components run through our communications and considering the global nature of our business we develop and run a number of regional marketing campaigns to attract graduates.

We have a number of recruitment products that are used to entice candidates to apply to Shell and we offer candidates a choice of three routes they can use to apply into Shell.

1. Shell Recruitment Days - enabling us to see you in action within a variety of possible work scenarios, if successful it could lead to a job offer.
2. Internships - offering real responsibility and a chance to test your business skills in a real work environment where we access you while you work with us and could lead to a job offer.
3. Gourami - an interactive five day business challenge where candidates are taken away to a remote location to work on a business plan within different teams where they are accessed and could again lead to a job offer.

Further, Shell is a truly global company offering diversity and an international working environment within the workplace. In 2007 we recruited over 90 different nationalities globally with one in four graduates hired from outside their home country. The key to our success is to work closely with our colleagues such as the Shell Brands International team in positioning a consistent image of Shell in the marketplace.

Shell has to satisfy the expectations of so many different stakeholders – how do you work to do this?

Venetia Howes, head of brand strategy implementation:

As you rightly point out, our stakeholders have diverse functional requirements of Shell.

In order to meet these different needs we organise ourselves into businesses to serve each of these customer groups. It's not a perfect alignment because some stakeholders fit into more than one group, but each business tries to develop a deep understanding of that particular customer group and to meet its needs.

Overarching this is an attitudinal connection that links all these stakeholders together - an interest in the energy challenge and a desire to be part of the solution. This is an attitude that we in Shell share, and it enables us to communicate with this widely diverse group of audiences from a common starting point.

Shell employs over 108,000 worldwide, it must be a mammoth task to ensure all your employees represent your brand as well as possible. How do you work towards this?

I'm glad your question asks how we are "working towards" employees representing the brand. This is a huge task. It's less a matter of numbers (many organisations employ more people than us) and more a matter of complexity - more than 130 countries, and all types of professions.

There are no silver bullets - we just have to do all the right things and do them well. We are approaching it through three streams of work. The most visible are the external communications, which speak as much to our employees as to our external stakeholders.

The second workstream is applying the brand strategy 'lens' to our business strategies, plans and actions. Actions speak louder than words, and this is the area where the promise expressed in the communications is turned into delivery. When employees see it happening in practice, they are more likely to conclude that this is something worth supporting.

The third workstream is employee engagement. In this area we include onboarding materials for new employees, content for leadership development courses, employee opinion research and measurement, internal communications (and this is a key area using every channel and network available to us to permeate the messages through the organisation), leadership actions, and experiences designed to increase pride in Shell.