CommsKit Case Study: Unilever
Employer branding for large workforces: eight years with Unilever Africa
ABOUT
Unilever is one of the world's largest consumer goods companies, with products sold in 190 countries and 96,000 people employed globally.
Its African business runs graduate recruitment from a regional talent function, feeding intakes across multiple markets. We worked with that function for eight years as its employer brand and production partner.
WORKFORCE
96,000+ globally
LOCATION
Pan-African, including:
Ghana
Kenya
Nigeria
South Africa
Tanzania
Zimbabwe
Zambia
TLDR
Employer branding for large workforces breaks down when every territory builds its own material and the internal team turns over. Unilever Africa's talent function brought us in to hold one system across the continent, from campaign concept and photography through to roadshow stands and graduate handbooks. The partnership ran for eight years.
What happens when every territory builds its own recruitment material?
Employer branding for large workforces is rarely undone by a weak campaign. It is undone by repetition. Unilever Africa's talent team approached us (then Halo Media, now CommsKit) through a referral, looking for one partner who could produce the full range of graduate recruitment material rather than a different supplier for each piece.
The material itself was not the issue. The issue was that it kept being remade. Individual territories produced their own versions of the graduate campaign, so the same thinking was commissioned and paid for several times over in different markets. On the client side, the team that owned the work changed regularly, and each change meant the concept, the messaging and the visual approach were rebuilt rather than carried forward. Nothing compounded. Every year began roughly where the last one had started.
8 years
length of the partnership
8 annual campaigns
one concept per year, rolled across every touchpoint
±25 pieces
campaign collateral produced per annual cycle
7 markets
across Pan-African region
Why employer branding for large workforces fragments
An employer brand system is the set of concepts, templates, photography and written guidance that lets multiple territories and a changing internal team produce recruitment and induction material without rebuilding it from scratch.
Where that system is absent, three things tend to happen together. Cost layers, because each market commissions a version of work that already exists elsewhere. Messaging dilutes, because each version is a fresh interpretation rather than a continuation of the last. And alignment to the parent brand loosens, because global identity governance is written centrally while local applications are being interpreted market by market.
That last point was the sharpest constraint here. Unilever's global identity is tightly governed, and the African graduate material had to sit inside that governance while still reading as relevant to students in markets as different as Nigeria and Zimbabwe. Local print suppliers varied by country. The brand rules did not.
The work
The work settled into an annual cycle broken into quarterly phases. That rhythm mattered more than any individual deliverable, because the rhythm is what stopped the restart.
Quarterly phases inside an annual cycle
Each year opened with research and concept development, with the creative team and copywriter working together on the core message and the visual idea supporting it. Once the direction was approved, the second phase moved into photography and base graphics. The remaining phases rolled that base out into print, digital, roadshow and social material, and then into induction material as the new intake arrived.
Because the concept was set once and applied outward, a brochure, an exhibition stand, a set of social graphics and an interactive PDF read as the same campaign while being tailored to their own format. Consistency stopped being something the team had to defend piece by piece.
Real graduates, and global assets localised rather than replaced
Campaign photography used actual Unilever graduates rather than stock imagery. Where Unilever had produced international 3D assets centrally, we photographed local people and placed them into that existing material, localising the global work instead of commissioning a parallel version of it. It kept the African campaigns inside global brand governance and reduced how much had to be produced from nothing each year.
Level-Up: a learning platform built before LMS tools were common
Unilever's graduate team wanted to offer something to applicants who were not hired, not only to those who were. A formal learning management system would have taken most of the budget and reached fewer people, so we proposed a smaller learning development platform instead.
The result was Level-Up, named to match how the audience already talked about progress. Unilever's team wrote the base content. We designed the modules as PowerPoint files so their team could update them without coming back to us, built a simple web platform for download and interaction, and handled delivery end to end including supplier management.
Handbooks: where attraction becomes induction
Once graduates and interns arrived, the same system carried into their first weeks. Printed diaries, interactive handbooks and toolkits covered how the programme worked, what was expected and how to find their way around the organisation. A graduate who had seen a poster at a campus roadshow met the same visual and verbal system on their first day. That continuity is the part employer brand work most often drops.
Scope delivered
A multi-level approach is handled by matching modules with each other.
ONBOARD
The CommsKit brand-led onboarding system.
It is the module for organisations where new starters currently meet a different brand on their first day to the one that attracted them.
BOOST
Additional elements are handled through our BOOST options that allow us to create bespoke solutions.
From custom campaigns through to digital platforms
Deliverables
- Annual employer brand concept, strategy input, research and copywriting
- Custom photoshoots of Unilever graduates, and localisation of global 3D assets
- Brochures, leaflets and print collateral, from A5 flyers to A3 fold-out formats
- Exhibition stands and roadshow collateral, from banner walls to full stand builds
- PowerPoint templates and presentation design for the talent team
- Social graphics supplied as editable files to Unilever's social media team
- Graduate and intern handbooks, printed diaries and interactive PDFs
- The Level-Up learning platform: concept, modules, website build and supplier management
What changed
Stated as observable facts from the engagement, not as claimed results.
- Eight annual campaigns delivered, each producing around 15 pieces of campaign collateral, alongside monthly social requirements and ongoing handbook work
- One concept per year applied across print, digital, roadshow, presentation and induction material, in place of separate interpretations produced territory by territory
- Material distributed across Unilever's African markets, including South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania
- Graduate photography shot locally rather than sourced from stock libraries
- One of the first agencies globally to roll out Unilever's updated brand identity when it changed in 2013, and lead design agency of contact for African graduate material
- "Best Advert" at the GradX industry awards for employer branding
- Eight years of continuous partnership through multiple changes of internal owner
They go above and beyond
"Our partnership together is very good. They are reliable and creative, and go above and beyond for projects. I know I can rely on them"
Mpho, Talent Officer, Unilever
How this work maps to CommsKit today
How would this work for your organisation?
The Unilever work predates the CommsKit name, but it is how the managed service runs now. In practice it comes down to two things.
Build the system once, then hold it. Employer brand material gets rebuilt because there is nothing central to build from. Agree the concept, the photography, the templates and the wording once, then write down what is fixed and what each market can change. After that a new campaign is an application of the system rather than a fresh start, and a new person on the team inherits something instead of beginning again. You can achieve this through our KITS modules.
Carry it past the offer letter. Attraction and induction usually sit with different people and different budgets, which is why a new starter's first day so often looks nothing like the campaign that brought them in. Use the same system for handbooks, first-week material and the Day 0 to Day 90 journey. That is our Employee onboarding module.
Together they cover the two moments a large employer's brand is most exposed: when someone decides whether to apply, and when someone decides whether to stay.
Frequently asked questions
If your employer brand is being rebuilt every time the team changes, or every territory is producing its own version of the same campaign, we can look at what it would take to hold it in one system.
Book a call and we will walk you through how ONBOARD and KITS work together.