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Impact of the employer brand in employee attraction and retention: Evidence from Unilever Sri Lanka Limited



 Employer Brand is ‘.a set of attributes and qualities, often intangible, that makes an organization distinctive, promises a particular kind of employment experience, and appeals to those people who will thrive and perform best in its culture’.’ (CIPD 2009). Ambler and Barrow (1996) highlighted that the main purpose of Employer Brand is to help management whit prioritizing tasks and processes as well as obviously improve recruitment, retention and engagement.

Unilever is an Anglo-Dutch company, which owns a sizable portion of the world’s consumer product brands in food, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products and it is comprised of 400 powerhouse brands yielding €46.5 billion in annual sales. Unilever Sri Lanka limited, through-out the year, continues to reach out to different educational institutions such as government institution and private institution to interact with the new generation.  Furthermore, they involve the research and development activities used by the students by creating long term impact within the talent group. Product quality, social services activities, continue research and development are also enhancing the Unilever brand among society (Siriniyasan 2012).  As an example, Project Sunlight will target waste management by converting 5000 retail outlets to solar energy by 2020. Partners in the project are the Ministry of Power and Renewable Energy, Unilever Sri Lanka, Commercial Bank, and Aitken Spence (Daily Mirror 17 September 2018, p.18 ).
 By considering the popularity, attraction, retention and welfare activities, LinkedIn ranked the Unilever brand as the most demand employer in the world ( Nisen,2012). However, under the existing higher attraction and retention level, there have recently been a number of recruitment frauds operating in different parts of the world where individuals are contacting job seekers claiming to represent Unilever, offering those roles and then inevitably asking for payments to cover a range of expenses and administration costs. That type of fraud activities and unethical messages such as “carcinogenic contamination with Unilever product” which is spared among the society by social media can be affected by the Employer Brand of Unilever.  


Reference

AMBLER, T., BARROW, S., 1996. The Employer Brand. The Journal of Brand Management, vol.4, no.3, pp.185-206.
CIPD, 2009., The Impact of Mergers and Acquisitions on Employer Brands. [viewed 13th of June] Available from:< http://www.cipd.co.uk/NR/rdonlyres/B18B30DD-A71F-4AAC-9925- 0D9C1EB5EF24/0/Impact_mergers_acquisitions_employer_brands.pdf>.
Nissen,M., What the world’s 5th most-in-Demand Employer Is Looking For. Available from:< https://www.businessinsider.com/unilever-recruiting-strategy-2012-10>.[19 October 2012].

Srinivasan,L 2012, Secrets of Employer Branding Leaders: Unilever.21 August 2012.LinkedIn Talent Blog. Available from :< https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/2012/08/employer-branding-unilever>.[21 August 2012].

Comments

  1. Razi JalaldeenApril 19, 2019 at 4:15 AM

    Good review. However, need reference or evidence to some of your claims such as annual sales value, recruitment fraud etc.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Naz Journals April 19, 2019 at 5:52 AM

    Dr Razi,thanks for your comments the recruitment fraud. taken from the unilever website https://www.unilever.com.lk/careers/ therefore I didn't mention in the reference. and annual sales value taken from below link
    https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/2012/08/employer-branding-unilever>.[21 August 2012].
    which is included in the article in references.





    ReplyDelete

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