From "Taste the Success" to "Possibilities" - Creating a consistant employment brand at PepsiCo. An in-depth interview with Paul Marchand

Staying fresh and creative is a challenge for any organization, even one known for its excellent people programs like PepsiCo. With literally hundreds of brands and thousands of employees around the globe, the sheer size and scale of selection and hiring would be an excuse for many to accept “good enough”. But not this intrepid talent acquisition team. Instead they seized the opportunity to innovate. The outcomes are fantastic: cool apps, inspired business leaders, a dedication to community involvement, and a talent management hatchery. All this from a company whose namesake product premiered on the drugstore shelf over 100 years ago!

Welcome to a special Talent Acquisition Inside Recruiting channel podcast on TotalPicture Radio, this is Peter Clayton reporting from the HCI Strategic Talent Acquisition Conference in New York City. I'm delighted to have on the show today Paul Marchand, vice president of global talent acquisition at PepsiCo.

 

Paul Marchand's Linkedin Profie:

VP Global Talent Acquisition PepsiCo
Public Company; PEP; Food & Beverages industry
February 2008 – Present (3 years 5 months)

• Executive Search – manage all senior level hiring for PepsiCo globally, including direct report positions to the CEO. Partner with global search firms as well as boutique providers. Complete on average 30 searches per year over the past three years.

• Employment Branding – led cross functional and global team in an 18 month project to “re-brand” PepsiCo’s employment message. Managed external partners (JWT, JoeZeff Design and Weber) as well as internal partners (Global Communications and IT) in the overall journey. New branding is “live” on www.pepsico.com – “Possibilities”

• People Leadership – manage a large and diverse team across locations, levels and business units. Regular and frequent communication ties the team together. Developed a rich capability program to ensure we have the strongest Talent Acquisition Managers. Achieved top scores on Manager Quality index and Org Health survey in consecutive years.

• Campus Recruiting - Aligned business unit specific campus efforts into PEP Pof1 approach – specifically in the areas of Marketing, Finance, R&D, Supply Chain/Operations and HR. Redesigned career path, compensation program, marketing approach and ultimate resource solutions (direct TA resources as well as business/function teams)

• Recruitment Technology – Led global project to implement new ATS solution for PepsiCo. Included in this initiative was business case development, funding process, RFP/vendor selection, strategic roadmap, and implementation plan and sustainability model. New solution went live – March 2011.

• Business Partnership – partner closely with key senior executives on Talent Mgmt and critical transformation activities. Key example is the on-going partnership with the Chief Scientific Officer to significantly upgraded and enhance the capability of R&D.

Paul Marchand TotalPicture Radio, HCI Transcript

At TotalPicture Radio we produce broadcast quality interviews that link companies to customers, prospects, employees, and passive candidates. TotalPicture Radio is radio TiVo.

Podcasting enables our listeners to quickly and easily find and download our exclusive interviews for playback on MP3 players, tablets, and smartphones. Through our unique highly targeted podcast interviews, TotalPicture Radio can extend the conference, continue the conversation, and provide valuable content and information your target market will want to hear.

Working with press credentials, we cover numerous high-profiled conferences and events throughout the year, including ERE, HCI, SHRM, HR Tech, IACPR, and many others. To receive a free media kit and to learn more about our sponsorship opportunities, please call (203) 292-0012 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Peter: Hi. This is Peter Clayton with TotalPicture Radio and we are at the HCI Strategic talent acquisition Conference here in New York City and I’m delighted to have on the show finally Paul Marchand who is the Vice President of talent acquisition at PepsiCo.

Paul, thanks for joining us today.

Paul: Thank you Peter.

Peter: I really enjoyed your presentation today and you started off by saying that you got an HR generalist background.

Paul: Yes.

Peter: And one of the things that I talked about actually in an event earlier this year at ERE was the friction between HR and recruiters and often times you’re out there trying to please a hiring manager?

Paul: Sure.

Peter: And the HR generalist is out there trying to please the hiring manager and sometimes the HR generalist gets in the way of the recruiter and vice versa. So from your perspective working in both roles, how do you go about making sure that everyone is playing nice and that what you’re really trying to do is bring in the best talent and obviously that’s HR’s role too.

Paul: Sure, so dirty little secret?

Peter: Yeah.

Paul: I used to be a recruiter. Through my recruiting experiences, I grew in the organization evolved into doing a generalist role. From a generalist role, I went back to recruiting roles and leadership positions in terms of running talent acquisition and staffing departments. My most recent position before the one that I’m in right now at PepsiCo was a senior generalist partner.

So dirty little secret is I think what was thought to me early on by a mentor was to really have a robust HR career. One needs to move throughout the different aspects of HR from training and development to talent acquisition or recruiting to compensation and benefits to labor relations.

That makes you a true complete HR professional and so I subscribe to that philosophy and as a result while I say that I’m formally a generalist and my most recent experience at the heart of it, I’ve got a whole host of HR experiences including staffing and that makes me credible with the generalist. It makes me credible with a business partner and it makes me credible within the talent acquisition community but that’s my story and that might not be every listener’s story and so what I would answer to your question is really thinking about putting yourselves in those people’s seats and trying to do a better job of listening and a better job of engaging, and a better job of understanding as opposed to just telling.

So if you are a person who’s got a deep talent acquisition or recruiting and staffing background and you bring capability to the table and you’re raising the game and you’re understanding the marketplace, understanding the candidate community, understanding how to negotiate self and get people to join, those are all positives, those are things you want to accentuate and you want to go into that conversation with the generalist partner and the business and bring those capabilities to the table. But, I don’t think you as a person doing that work should sacrifice a point of view. I don’t think you should sacrifice your deep history and your deep tenure for simply caving in or sort of throwing in the towel.

I think it’s important that the generalist and the hiring manager or the business leader hears what you have to say. You have to do it with compassion and understanding and data, and facts but that’s how you add value to the process. So I see it as a challenge of course. It’s no different than any challenge of people having to come together to collaborate who are coming from different places and it’s something that the TA function needs to figure out how to work better at as does the generalist function needs to do a better job of listening.

For example, what we’ve done with the generalist community is really brought them into the talent acquisition conversation. When we have offsite meetings we’ll invite them to come. We’ve done panels with them. We’ve ensured that they get pre-wiring of some of the things that we’re doing out in the marketplace so that they can stand up with us together as kind of one (because we are all HR) and sort of say to the business, we think this is what you need to go do and you don’t get into that ‘doing it for me’ or ‘pleasing me’ kind of model.

Peter: You have a very compelling story that you told this morning in your presentation about how PepsiCo has evolved in the talent acquisition process…

Paul: Yeah, the journey.

Peter: It’s been what 3 years now you have been in this role?

Paul: Yeah. I have been in the role 3 years and we’ve been evolving at about 2½ years now.

Peter: Give us a little bit of the background and when you first came in to this role as we all know PepsiCo has all these different brands, Frito Lay, Quaker, Pepsi and it wasn’t anything coordinated, right?

Paul: That’s exactly right, Peter. I think the point was that our head of HR, Cynthia Trudell, had a vision. She had a vision for talent and she has and had a vision for our learning agenda, and decided that she was going to create two positions, funded at the corporate enterprise level. I went in one of them, a colleague of mine went in the other and this was about building capability at the center of excellence kind of mandate.

My story was about building the capability in the talent acquisition space doing a better job, doing a smarter job, doing a more strategic job of finding and delivering and hiring quality talent.

In the classic PepsiCo challenge, it was brought on me. I accepted it with limited resources, limited budget and sort of a blank sheet of paper and that is exactly the kind of situation that I particularly like to be in. It’s very uncomfortable. Your stomach is sinking but every night you’re thinking about new ideas and new thoughts. Everyday you’re getting up you know bouncing out of the bed trying to get to the office fast, and you’re just charged up because of the vision and the opportunity what you see the future could be.

Now, I kind of had to come up with that vision with a collective point of view of people in the field, people in the business, people in HR but this was an objective to kind of bring to your point all those distinct brands and those distinct businesses and their successes together where you know 1 plus 1 equals a sort of proverbial 3 as opposed to 2 and that’s what we’ve been trying to do.

Peter: You have been doing a lot of work with social media. You are very engaged with LinkedIn. One of the slides you showed I think you had at one point…

Paul: 416 people.

Peter: 416 people and now over 30,000 people?

Paul: Yeah. I think we’re up to 36,000. These are people that are tagged and connected to our PepsiCo LinkedIn page, not a Quaker page for LinkedIn, not a Frito page for LinkedIn, not a Pepsi page right but a PepsiCo page. We reinforced the total brand and the total story, and the total company message to the candidate community that we’re engaging with.

By the way, that also means once some of those people joined because they all won’t join but some of those people joined. They will have joined under the concept of one company.

Peter: Right.

Paul: Right? Think about the transformation that will be. Now that will take a couple of years maybe even half of a decade but as all of those people joined and they come under, who you joined? What division? I joined PepsiCo and they’re talking to an employee who has been there for 20 years. I joined. I joined Frito. Well, that’s nice. That’s the division to happen to work at but you joined PepsiCo in today and go forward model. That journey is the journey we’ve been on for the last 2 to 3 years and social medial at the LinkedIn conversation that you just raised has been one critical and very focused effort by us. We made it. We can’t do everything for everybody and we said, “You know what? We’re going to place a lot of chips on to the digital and social media space.” So that’s the app capability that we worked with a vendor and UK called All Things Banana.

We work with a company called Joe Zeff Design to create the possibilities brand. This wasn’t even an employer branding company. This wasn’t even an ad agency. These guys create messaging out of a few keywords and they create images that the messaging connects to. They do things for like Newsweek and Time. They do tablet and app type stuff.

We partnered with LinkedIn and said, “Hey we want to kind of go deep and go big with you.” We’ve partnered with Twitter, to really investing in the social and digital media to tell our story, to create conversation and to build awareness.

Peter: So PepsiCo launches an app, and where do they launch it? South by Southwest?

Paul: Yeah. This was part of being mainstream I mean you know I’m not… no dig to an ERE event or an HCI event or any other wonderful talent acquisition events where we have to all come together, but we thought it was prime opportunity to launch a technology platform at an event that’s specifically to that community. We thought it would add to the broader capabilities.

So that’s an example of where we knew what we were doing was great, but there a lot of other digital and social media efforts going on across PepsiCo and so rather than be off on an island doing our own thing, we kind of partnered with the communications function, the marketing function where they have digital and social resources and we sent our leader down there and it became seamless then. People are like, oh of course. You have an app for this for consumer and you have an app for that for talent. You guys have figured it out. You guys are kind of connecting the dots and that was our intent. That was our strategy and again not to suggest we won’t want to watch an ERE event but it really makes sense.

Peter: Right but to your point, I think that is a perfect venue for launching something like that.

Paul: That’s right.

Peter: Right?

Paul: Yeah.

Peter: You have re-branded your employment brand from taste the success.

Paul: Taste the Success, yup.

Peter: To Possibilities.

Paul: To Possibilities, yes.

Peter: Tell us a little bit about that journey and the thought process that went in to that evolution.

Paul: Yes. So Taste to Success was a great tagline. It was a great message and Steve Reinemund our former chairman was critically involved along with our current chairman (she likes to be called the chairman not a chairwoman) Indra Nooyi, in the acquisition of the Quaker oats company in 1999 and 2000 and at that point they had over 10 or 12,000 employees and they came back from a meeting as the deal was being kind of finalized and everything was going to be green light and they said, “You know we got to tell these people who PepsiCo is.” You know, they don’t know it. They don’t know PepsiCo.

They might know Frito Lay or the Pepsi brands, but they don’t know who PepsiCo is as the company they work for and thus created a flurry of activity in the HR and communications function to create a couple of things including our leadership imperatives and our guidelines in terms of how we look at leadership and the things that we inspire leaders to have including an employment tagline called Taste of Success, but it was very much geared, Peter, for an acquisition activity.

It was not geared for general consumption in the marketplace. It was not geared for…I mean this is 2000 so it wasn’t digital. I mean Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school. So this was not geared towards social and digital media yet. It was really geared for a little tagline you put on a career booth. A little tagline you put on a career brochure and internal messaging.

Well that’s what stuck and it stuck with us for quite some time but no one really thought about it and no one really focused on it. Quite frankly because you went through a lot of economic up and down periods so that’s 2000 and 2010 timeframe but quite frankly it’s not as if we weren’t unable to attract good talent. We have the ability to attract good talent by the legacy and the academy company and the name, but when I came in to look at the opportunity I said you know this doesn’t talk about who we are as a company. It’s not complete. It’s not global. It’s not translated into multi languages. It’s not simple. It doesn’t speak to beyond the packages and the products we touch on our shelves.

We need something new and we need something fresh and that itself was a good 9-12 month project, if not more. You had to align people from around the world. You had to gather insights and information. You got to hire some firms to help you. You had to brainstorm and one of the key things we did early on is while it was an HR led project, we brought the business in at the very beginning. We brought marketers in. We brought sales people in, we brought operations people in, and we told them what we are about to do and we say “We need you to help us.”

So it is a sense of ownership, a sense of pride and an inclusive nature of the initiative and that went on for quite some time and we landed possibilities with this firm, Joe Zeff Design and we love it. I mean we think it really…there are so many ways in which to communicate it but at the same time it is very straight forward and very simple. It’s very kind of a PepsiCo-isk. I mean we learned in our insights that one of the key things that people why they join the company and why they stay is this notion of ceasing the day, this insight with ceasing the day. People love to get up every day and get out and sell more product or deliver more product or make the product faster, a better or smarter on the production line or come up with a new advertising campaign or figure out a new PNL and it really matched up with our perform for the purpose kind of agenda, and so possibilities really fits, and it’s taking off. It’s taking off really well externally and now we’re going to turn on some internal activation over the next 6 months.

Peter: Something else that I found very interesting in your presentation is speaking about global, you are a global brand, you have about 300,000 employees out there. So how do you go about recruiting globally? One of the very interesting case studies you showed was from China were you had… I don’t know… 46,000…

Paul: 46,000 résumés just for a sales college recruiting program.

Peter: And out of that 46,000…

Paul: We got it down to about 180 hires or something like that.

Peter: Right. That’s an amazing pipeline right there, right?

Paul: Yes. So how do we do it? I think that there are some things that we believe are enterprise wider, global in nature and then I think there are some things that are very much local. So that China story is all the hard work of our Chinese HR team.

We have head of HR for the China business unit. That person has talent management, talent acquisition, compensation of benefits all within that country. I mean it’s a big employee population. It’s a big market for us and it’s strategic and we want to win, and we want to be very much on the cutting edge of what’s all about in China and that’s just one example.

I mean you could say Brazil is similarly positioned. India is similarly positioned where Russia with the big acquisition of Wimbledon. So in China that is more about sharing and collaborating and partnering than it is about doing because if you try to go in there and do for them, you take something that’s US centric or even try to take something that you think is global and just sort of push it into the market, there’s an organ rejection rightly so that happens. It’s not that they’re doing it because they don’t want to play ball; they’re doing it because it just doesn’t work and we’re not understanding them.

I had the fortunate opportunity to spend 14 days in China last summer and you really need to go to the market to understand what is happening, what are the consumer preferences and what is the competitive landscape and what is the customer profile look like and it’s a very unique and different and special place.

And so they need to come up with their local solutions then we can help them globally to figure out how to scale it or maximize it or benefit from it. So for example if they come up with their own Chinese employment brand for PepsiCo China that would be an example where we’re deleveraging the PepsiCo story as opposed to we bring possibilities and we extend it globally but you know what they do on campus is very unique and specific.

Similarly assured the India story around the contest for our chairman and kind of winning the job. It’s being an advisor to Indra. You get the chance to meet with her and tell her about the case that you’ve written and this is a wonderful project.

Peter: How did that whole project come about?

Paul: Yeah, again it’s the India team. I’m fortunate like you to be telling a story of their work. I’m sort of like sitting around with my kids and reading a story of a wonderful book that Dr. Seuss wrote. I mean this is their story. This is the India team’s story. We had a woman there, Nageena. We have a whole team of people there that are passionate about talent, passionate about talent acquisition and they came up with this incredibly creative idea.

Now, you know, we’re celebrating it. We’re speaking about it. We’re leveraging it. Now, we’re not going to create to be Indra’s advisors in every country.

We’re realistic that that’s the one place we’re doing it and it’s a great idea and they’re going to own it and win with it, but it just goes to show you that not everything comes from corporate. Not everything is center led. We have to be flexible. You have to listen to what’s happening in the local market and then you have to support them and leverage what they’re doing and scale it. Help them scale it.

Peter: When you talked about college recruiting and I thought it was really interesting. You showed one slide where it was like all of your brands together…

Paul: Yes, the possibilities booth.

Peter: …and yeah, the possibilities booth and a couple of years ago, you go to a college recruiting function and there will be Frito Lay booth…

Paul: Table, yeah sure.

Peter: Yeah. So how were you able to get everyone on board and realized it it’s…yeah.

Paul: We still are Peter. I mean there are groups still today that kind of off on their own and kind of doing their own thing. Again, not…you know what’s amazing about our company and our culture is that the intentions are never negative or they’re trying to do something bad or trying to hurt you. Intentions are always positive. It’s execution that’s sometimes is not being thought through that’s not leveraging and so this goes back to our CEO and her strategic comparatives.

PepsiCo is power of one and where it makes sense we should come together as power of one. That’s an example we should come together as power of one. Now going back to the China example, they don’t go to campuses China foods and China beverages. We sell China foods, snacks, Frito Lay, Quaker products. We sell beverages, Gatorade, Pepsi but they have already recognized that in this country and this massive employment market where they need to be clear about who they are and what they do, there goes PepsiCo China.

And that’s the sort of challenge we are facing in the US and the US was a little bit more historical in nature. Frito Lay was a company that merged with PepsiCo and Pepsi Cola in 1965. Quaker Oats was purchased as I said earlier in 2000 and the legacy and the history which are all gray and we’re proud of it got in the way of execution and got in the way of coming together as one, and we really didn’t integrate these companies when we first spot them but now we’re realizing it’s very important to tell a story in a particular consumer’s base about one PepsiCo.

It’s no different than what we’re trying to do with the investor community. So Peter, we get this all the time. When we do news releases or when we do quarterly earnings, they tend to either say PepsiCo or Pepsi, and they want to frame it up of Pepsi versus Coca Cola, which is definitely one of our competitors, but that’s not the only competitor because we compete with Sara Lee, and we compete with Kraft, and we compete with some of Procter & Gamble’s business and with Dannon.

In the campus recruiting space, the challenges are the same. We need to communicate to the candidate community or the students and the school’s placement offices that we’re PepsiCo and here’s who we are and this is what we’re about and we’re about this scale, about this breadth, and we’re about this business.

Now that doesn’t mean that when you join you don’t start out as a marketer on Ruffles in Plano, Texas.

Peter: Right.

Paul: That’s your first position in a hopefully long career in marketing and then maybe after that you do a position in the field or then after that you move to New York and you do position on our joint venture with Starbucks and work on frappuccino. That gets back to the possibilities, they become sort of endless. But we needed to convince the business that this is okay, that this was the right thing to do and we started functionally.

Tell the marketing team, tell the R&D team, tell the finance team, tell the sales team why going to Darden or going to SMU or wherever the campus was where we go as three or four separate companies, why it’s not an effective recruiting method. Why it’s not with the consumer or candidate wants to hear. They don’t want to hear three different stories. Then you don’t look organized. Then you don’t look strategic. Then you don’t look like your one family. It’s okay to tell the stories of the siblings; we’ve got to talk about the parents.

Peter: Yeah and speaking about your competitors, when you get in to talent acquisition it’s much broader.

Paul: It’s much broader. Yeah, I have to tell people that all the time and historically going back 10, 15 or 20 years, we were more of like targeting just CPG companies

Peter: Right.

Paul: But we’ve had great success and we’ve had great focus at looking beyond CPG. So for example in the pharmaceutical industry, they have a lot of over the counter consumer based products.

In the manufacturing industry beyond food manufacturing, other types of manufacturing. In the entertainment industry. In the retailing industry, we’ve had great success hiring people from what would not be typically thought of as our competitor.

The point is, is that great talent sits in many different industries, and if they’ve got high learning agility and if they’ve got great passion and they’ve got the ability to seize the day and see the possibilities, I mean it goes into the insights of what the cultures like then they might be great for us just like they’re great at XYZ other company and we don’t target a specific company, but I think what we’ve done is busted out the idea that we just compete against CPG and I think that’s an important change for us.

I spent time in the financial service industry and that industry tends to want or recruit specifically just from financial services and while that works and that make sense, what you do find is a little bit of the sort of résumé of people that are all financial service orientated from one firm to another firm and they’re a little myopic and they’re a little just sort of kind of head down focused on their one space, and I welcome the idea of bringing people from other industries.

Peter: There’s a really fascinating profile of PepsiCo in a recent New Yorker, and a couple of the things that it brought up is you are really transforming your brand and your company and how people perceive you with much more healthy foods, for one thing.

Paul: Yes.

Peter: Very much into sustainability and the greens kinds of things.

Paul: Yes.

Peter: Tell us a little about that and how that works into your recruiting.

Paul: Yeah, we’re fortunate. I mean honestly, Peter, I can say I have one of the best jobs there are because #1, we got an amazing CEO and when you have an amazing CEO who has a wonderful vision and wonderful strategy who rallies the organization, who has a deep history with the company. You’re blessed and she and others kind of created this vision of something we call internally and now externally performs with purpose.

It’s on our corporate website. It’s what we talk to investors about. It’s what we talk to customers about and quite frankly it’s now what we’re talking to consumers about and which is we’re still a performance-oriented company. We still seek growth. We still look for double digits on our annualized basis in terms of revenue and margin, but we’re doing it with purpose and the purpose planks are environment, nourishment and talent.

In the environment space, people are shock when they hear some of the things that we do and we’re doing a better job of communicating it. For example, we do have the largest fleet of trucks outside the UPS that go up and down the streets in the United States every single day and we have an initiative that were sponsored by PepsiCo partnering with the industry and partnering with key government leaders and recently got recognition by President Obama which is around trucks that are green. Whether they are electric or they are certain hybrid type of concept, we got those. We’re on our Frito Lay business.

We got plants in both Pepsi and Quaker and Tropicana and Frito Lay. There are being certified lead that is taking energy from the sun or we’re using water and putting all that stuff that were taken out and back in.

On the nourishment side, we got you know as you saw in the presentation, we got a wonderful leader and Dr. Mahmood Khan who’s a scientist at nature, at heart and his passion and he’s got his entire R&D and innovation function. Really looking at the better for you and good for you kind of approaches. Baking versus frying. Taking out things that aren’t necessarily good for you. Decreasing salt but not sacrificing on taste, which requires tremendous amount of technology and advancement.

And on the talent side, you heard so much today of what we’ve been doing but we’ve also been proud of our diversity inclusions. The three planks and the whole performance piece is a wonderful thing for us to kind of what I call ladder down from and we laddered down from that in the possibilities and in the possibilities of branding, we talk about those stories.

We have a video of a gentleman by the name of Christian White on our career site and he talks about taking a plant in Arizona green for Frito Lay. We have a video of a gentleman who’s worked in our Naked Juice business in the UK and now is taking snacks to Asia and thinking about healthy for you snacking in that part of the world. We have an opportunity to sort of spotlight and showcase that wonderful strategy and those wonderful planks as a really compelling story for people to want to join. People want to succeed. They want to do great. They want to be better than they were yesterday, but now there’s this overarching kind of thing of people wanting to do it for a company that’s doing good and we feel like we’ve been about that for a long time and that story is now coming out very clearly.

Peter: You know a lot of your job applicants are also your customers.

Paul: Sure. We call them consumers.

Peter: Consumers.

Paul: Because our customers Wal-Mart or Target; the same thing.

Peter: The consumers are very important to your brand…

Paul: Yes.

Peter: …and as we all know in the application process, the black hole that’s talking about all the time.

Paul: Yes.

Peter: Somebody applies for a particular job…

Paul: And hear nothing.

Peter: And hears nothing so what are you doing to mitigate that?

Paul: So we are going…we’re in the midst, we’ve launched live in the US and Canada and we’re going global as we speak for a single sort of solution for our candidate experience with an applicant tracking system all around the world. The project is called “Hire 2 Onboard” (H2O) and we’re hoping that that will create a better and more rich experience.

We’re also trying to talk to the candidate as part of our engagement process in a more two-way dialogue versus a one-way dialogue. Certainly responsive in things like emails but also Twitter, LinkedIn and other kinds of forums.

Obviously when a candidate comes in to see us, the experience that we want them to have is positive. We want them to have feedback that happens in a very timely manner where they will know where they stand in the process. When we make an offer, we want the offer to be compelling. We want to listen to what their wants and needs are and be flexible that doesn’t always being paying the best. You can’t do necessarily the best for everything but you listen to their wants and their needs and if some person says to us, look the base is great; I’m happy with the sign on but I have an issue with my child or an issue with my spouse, we’ll listen, we’ll respond, we’ll try to be sensitive and we try to have a very high close rate obviously, but we know that not every person gets an interview.

We know that every person’s résumé does not get responded to. We know that every candidate does not necessarily who comes in you know get the offer and so what we try to do as a team is try to remember. Keep it very close to the front of our minds and remember that these are consumers.

These are people who either are currently buying, using, tasting, experiencing our products can refer people to our products, or quite frankly, aren’t using our products and because they go through the process, they learn about us.

We hear those stories every day. I mean not a lot of people know that PepsiCo makes Naked Juice. It’s very healthy for you product, California-based company that we purchased a couple of years ago. Not a lot of people know we make Stacy’s Pita Chip or have a joint venture with Sabra Dipping to make a hummus product. When they learn that, their eyes widen and they smile because they say, “Oh I love that” because maybe they’re not a consumer of our carbonated soft drink portfolio; maybe they’re more of a water drinker or a Gatorade drinker through athletic situations.

So we have to kind of keep that in the front of our mind, Peter, that these are consumers and we certainly don’t want to lose share. Lose share is bad, right?

Peter: Right.

Paul: We want to gain share but we want to gain share authentically and we have a role in that in the recruitment process. So it’s the best we can do to increase awareness of our brands, increase awareness of our performance with progress messaging and to treat those people with respect as we would want to be treated. We try.

We don’t win every day, Peter, but there are certainly people I’m sure that don’t get that experience and they’re disappointed but we try hard, and we know that we can be talking to a candidate about a role and then at night that candidate goes home and she’s a mommy blogger, and she blogs about us and says “Hey not only do I think that their product Quaker Oats is great and I have it every morning with my kids but I just actually interviewed from the company. I didn’t get the job but what a great experience. What a great company” and we want that to happen.

Peter: Paul, thank you so much for taking time to speak with us here on TotalPicture Radio.

Paul: Thank you. We finally met.

Peter: Yes thanks.

Paul: I’m glad we got together.

Peter: Thanks a lot.

We’ve been speaking with Paul Marchand, the VP of global talent acquisition at PepsiCo. Our interview with Paul was recorded at the HCI Strategic talent acquisition Conference in New York.

We welcome your comments on our interview today. You’ll find this podcast in the inside recruiting talent acquisition channel of TotalPicture Radio, that’s totalpicture.com. While there, please sign up for our newsletter and remember, you can subscribe to our program on iTunes. Just do a keyword search for TotalPicture Radio and join me on Twitter @PeterClayton.

Our interviews can link your company with your clients, prospects, employees, and passive candidates. Contact us for sponsorship opportunities at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Thank you for tuning in to TotalPicture Radio, the voice of career and leadership acceleration.

Paul Marchand TotalPicture Radio, HCI Transcript

At TotalPicture Radio we produce broadcast quality interviews that link companies to customers, prospects, employees, and passive candidates. TotalPicture Radio is radio TiVo.

Podcasting enables our listeners to quickly and easily find and download our exclusive interviews for playback on MP3 players, tablets, and smartphones. Through our unique highly targeted podcast interviews, TotalPicture Radio can extend the conference, continue the conversation, and provide valuable content and information your target market will want to hear.

Working with press credentials, we cover numerous high-profiled conferences and events throughout the year, including ERE, HCI, SHRM, HR Tech, IACPR, and many others. To receive a free media kit and to learn more about our sponsorship opportunities, please call (203) 292-0012 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Peter: Hi. This is Peter Clayton with TotalPicture Radio and we are at the HCI Strategic talent acquisition Conference here in New York City and I’m delighted to have on the show finally Paul Marchand who is the Vice President of talent acquisition at PepsiCo.

Paul, thanks for joining us today.

Paul: Thank you Peter.

Peter: I really enjoyed your presentation today and you started off by saying that you got an HR generalist background.

Paul: Yes.

Peter: And one of the things that I talked about actually in an event earlier this year at ERE was the friction between HR and recruiters and often times you’re out there trying to please a hiring manager?

Paul: Sure.

Peter: And the HR generalist is out there trying to please the hiring manager and sometimes the HR generalist gets in the way of the recruiter and vice versa. So from your perspective working in both roles, how do you go about making sure that everyone is playing nice and that what you’re really trying to do is bring in the best talent and obviously that’s HR’s role too.

Paul: Sure, so dirty little secret?

Peter: Yeah.

Paul: I used to be a recruiter. Through my recruiting experiences, I grew in the organization evolved into doing a generalist role. From a generalist role, I went back to recruiting roles and leadership positions in terms of running talent acquisition and staffing departments. My most recent position before the one that I’m in right now at PepsiCo was a senior generalist partner.

So dirty little secret is I think what was thought to me early on by a mentor was to really have a robust HR career. One needs to move throughout the different aspects of HR from training and development to talent acquisition or recruiting to compensation and benefits to labor relations.

That makes you a true complete HR professional and so I subscribe to that philosophy and as a result while I say that I’m formally a generalist and my most recent experience at the heart of it, I’ve got a whole host of HR experiences including staffing and that makes me credible with the generalist. It makes me credible with a business partner and it makes me credible within the talent acquisition community but that’s my story and that might not be every listener’s story and so what I would answer to your question is really thinking about putting yourselves in those people’s seats and trying to do a better job of listening and a better job of engaging, and a better job of understanding as opposed to just telling.

So if you are a person who’s got a deep talent acquisition or recruiting and staffing background and you bring capability to the table and you’re raising the game and you’re understanding the marketplace, understanding the candidate community, understanding how to negotiate self and get people to join, those are all positives, those are things you want to accentuate and you want to go into that conversation with the generalist partner and the business and bring those capabilities to the table. But, I don’t think you as a person doing that work should sacrifice a point of view. I don’t think you should sacrifice your deep history and your deep tenure for simply caving in or sort of throwing in the towel.

I think it’s important that the generalist and the hiring manager or the business leader hears what you have to say. You have to do it with compassion and understanding and data, and facts but that’s how you add value to the process. So I see it as a challenge of course. It’s no different than any challenge of people having to come together to collaborate who are coming from different places and it’s something that the TA function needs to figure out how to work better at as does the generalist function needs to do a better job of listening.

For example, what we’ve done with the generalist community is really brought them into the talent acquisition conversation. When we have offsite meetings we’ll invite them to come. We’ve done panels with them. We’ve ensured that they get pre-wiring of some of the things that we’re doing out in the marketplace so that they can stand up with us together as kind of one (because we are all HR) and sort of say to the business, we think this is what you need to go do and you don’t get into that ‘doing it for me’ or ‘pleasing me’ kind of model.

Peter: You have a very compelling story that you told this morning in your presentation about how PepsiCo has evolved in the talent acquisition process…

Paul: Yeah, the journey.

Peter: It’s been what 3 years now you have been in this role?

Paul: Yeah. I have been in the role 3 years and we’ve been evolving at about 2½ years now.

Peter: Give us a little bit of the background and when you first came in to this role as we all know PepsiCo has all these different brands, Frito Lay, Quaker, Pepsi and it wasn’t anything coordinated, right?

Paul: That’s exactly right, Peter. I think the point was that our head of HR, Cynthia Trudell, had a vision. She had a vision for talent and she has and had a vision for our learning agenda, and decided that she was going to create two positions, funded at the corporate enterprise level. I went in one of them, a colleague of mine went in the other and this was about building capability at the center of excellence kind of mandate.

My story was about building the capability in the talent acquisition space doing a better job, doing a smarter job, doing a more strategic job of finding and delivering and hiring quality talent.

In the classic PepsiCo challenge, it was brought on me. I accepted it with limited resources, limited budget and sort of a blank sheet of paper and that is exactly the kind of situation that I particularly like to be in. It’s very uncomfortable. Your stomach is sinking but every night you’re thinking about new ideas and new thoughts. Everyday you’re getting up you know bouncing out of the bed trying to get to the office fast, and you’re just charged up because of the vision and the opportunity what you see the future could be.

Now, I kind of had to come up with that vision with a collective point of view of people in the field, people in the business, people in HR but this was an objective to kind of bring to your point all those distinct brands and those distinct businesses and their successes together where you know 1 plus 1 equals a sort of proverbial 3 as opposed to 2 and that’s what we’ve been trying to do.

Peter: You have been doing a lot of work with social media. You are very engaged with LinkedIn. One of the slides you showed I think you had at one point…

Paul: 416 people.

Peter: 416 people and now over 30,000 people?

Paul: Yeah. I think we’re up to 36,000. These are people that are tagged and connected to our PepsiCo LinkedIn page, not a Quaker page for LinkedIn, not a Frito page for LinkedIn, not a Pepsi page right but a PepsiCo page. We reinforced the total brand and the total story, and the total company message to the candidate community that we’re engaging with.

By the way, that also means once some of those people joined because they all won’t join but some of those people joined. They will have joined under the concept of one company.

Peter: Right.

Paul: Right? Think about the transformation that will be. Now that will take a couple of years maybe even half of a decade but as all of those people joined and they come under, who you joined? What division? I joined PepsiCo and they’re talking to an employee who has been there for 20 years. I joined. I joined Frito. Well, that’s nice. That’s the division to happen to work at but you joined PepsiCo in today and go forward model. That journey is the journey we’ve been on for the last 2 to 3 years and social medial at the LinkedIn conversation that you just raised has been one critical and very focused effort by us. We made it. We can’t do everything for everybody and we said, “You know what? We’re going to place a lot of chips on to the digital and social media space.” So that’s the app capability that we worked with a vendor and UK called All Things Banana.

We work with a company called Joe Zeff Design to create the possibilities brand. This wasn’t even an employer branding company. This wasn’t even an ad agency. These guys create messaging out of a few keywords and they create images that the messaging connects to. They do things for like news week and time. They do tablet and app type stuff.

We partnered with LinkedIn and said, “Hey we want to kind of go deep and go big with you.” We’ve partnered with Twitter, to really investing in the social and digital media to tell our story, to create conversation and to build awareness.

Peter: So PepsiCo launches an app, and where do they launch it? South by Southwest?

Paul: Yeah. This was part of being mainstream I mean you know I’m not… no dig to an ERE event or an HCI event or any other wonderful talent acquisition events where we have to all come together, but we thought it was prime opportunity to launch a technology platform at an event that’s specifically to that community. We thought it would add to the broader capabilities.

So that’s an example of where we knew what we were doing was great, but there a lot of other digital and social media efforts going on across PepsiCo and so rather than be off on an island doing our own thing, we kind of partnered with the communications function, the marketing function where they have digital and social resources and we sent our leader down there and it became seamless then. People are like, oh of course. You have an app for this for consumer and you have an app for that for talent. You guys have figured it out. You guys are kind of connecting the dots and that was our intent. That was our strategy and again not to suggest we won’t want to watch an ERE event but it really makes sense.

Peter: Right but to your point, I think that is a perfect venue for launching something like that.

Paul: That’s right.

Peter: Right?

Paul: Yeah.

Peter: You have re-branded your employment brand from taste to success.

Paul: Taste to success, yup.

Peter: To possibilities.

Paul: To possibilities, yes.

Peter: Tell us a little bit about that journey and the thought process that went in to that evolution.

Paul: Yes. So Taste to Success was a great tagline. It was a great message and Steve Reinemund our former chairman was critically involved along with our current chairman (she likes to be called the chairman not a chairwoman) Indra Nooyi, in the acquisition of the Quaker oats company in 1999 and 2000 and at that point they had over 10 or 12,000 employees and they came back from a meeting as the deal was being kind of finalized and everything was going to be green light and they said, “You know we got to tell these people who PepsiCo is.” You know, they don’t know it. They don’t know PepsiCo.

They might know Frito Lay or the Pepsi brands, but they don’t know who PepsiCo is as the company they work for and thus created a flurry of activity in the HR and communications function to create a couple of things including our leadership imperatives and our guidelines in terms of how we look at leadership and the things that we inspire leaders to have including an employment tagline called Taste of Success, but it was very much geared, Peter, for an acquisition activity.

It was not geared for general consumption in the marketplace. It was not geared for…I mean this is 2000 so it wasn’t digital. I mean Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school. So this was not geared towards social and digital media yet. It was really geared for a little tagline you put on a career booth. A little tagline you put on a career brochure and internal messaging.

Well that’s what stuck and it stuck with us for quite some time but no one really thought about it and no one really focused on it. Quite frankly because you went through a lot of economic up and down periods so that’s 2000 and 2010 timeframe but quite frankly it’s not as if we weren’t unable to attract good talent. We have the ability to attract good talent by the legacy and the academy company and the name, but when I came in to look at the opportunity I said you know this doesn’t talk about who we are as a company. It’s not complete. It’s not global. It’s not translated into multi languages. It’s not simple. It doesn’t speak to beyond the packages and the products we touch on our shelves.

We need something new and we need something fresh and that itself was a good 9-12 month project, if not more. You had to align people from around the world. You had to gather insights and information. You got to hire some firms to help you. You had to brainstorm and one of the key things we did early on is while it was an HR led project, we brought the business in at the very beginning. We brought marketers in. We brought sales people in, we brought operations people in, and we told them what we are about to do and we say “We need you to help us.”

So it is a sense of ownership, a sense of pride and an inclusive nature of the initiative and that went on for quite some time and we landed possibilities with this firm, Joe Zeff Design and we love it. I mean we think it really…there are so many ways in which to communicate it but at the same time it is very straight forward and very simple. It’s very kind of a PepsiCo-isk. I mean we learned in our insights that one of the key things that people why they join the company and why they stay is this notion of ceasing the day, this insight with ceasing the day. People love to get up every day and get out and sell more product or deliver more product or make the product faster, a better or smarter on the production line or come up with a new advertising campaign or figure out a new PNL and it really matched up with our perform for the purpose kind of agenda, and so possibilities really fits, and it’s taking off. It’s taking off really well externally and now we’re going to turn on some internal activation over the next 6 months.

Peter: Something else that I found very interesting in your presentation is speaking about global, you are a global brand, you have about 300,000 employees out there. So how do you go about recruiting globally? One of the very interesting case studies you showed was from China were you had… I don’t know… 46,000…

Paul: 46,000 résumés just for a sales college recruiting program.

Peter: And out of that 46,000…

Paul: We got it down to about 180 hires or something like that.

Peter: Right. That’s an amazing pipeline right there, right?

Paul: Yes. So how do we do it? I think that there are some things that we believe are enterprise wider, global in nature and then I think there are some things that are very much local. So that China story is all the hard work of our Chinese HR team.

We have head of HR for the China business unit. That person has talent management, talent acquisition, compensation of benefits all within that country. I mean it’s a big employee population. It’s a big market for us and it’s strategic and we want to win, and we want to be very much on the cutting edge of what’s all about in China and that’s just one example.

I mean you could say Brazil is similarly positioned. India is similarly positioned where Russia with the big acquisition of Wimbledon. So in China that is more about sharing and collaborating and partnering than it is about doing because if you try to go in there and do for them, you take something that’s US centric or even try to take something that you think is global and just sort of push it into the market, there’s an organ rejection rightly so that happens. It’s not that they’re doing it because they don’t want to play ball; they’re doing it because it just doesn’t work and we’re not understanding them.

I had the fortunate opportunity to spend 14 days in China last summer and you really need to go to the market to understand what is happening, what are the consumer preferences and what is the competitive landscape and what is the customer profile look like and it’s a very unique and different and special place.

And so they need to come up with their local solutions then we can help them globally to figure out how to scale it or maximize it or benefit from it. So for example if they come up with their own Chinese employment brand for PepsiCo China that would be an example where we’re deleveraging the PepsiCo story as opposed to we bring possibilities and we extend it globally but you know what they do on campus is very unique and specific.

Similarly assured the India story around the contest for our chairman and kind of winning the job. It’s being an advisor to Indra. You get the chance to meet with her and tell her about the case that you’ve written and this is a wonderful project.

Peter: How did that whole project come about?

Paul: Yeah, again it’s the India team. I’m fortunate like you to be telling a story of their work. I’m sort of like sitting around with my kids and reading a story of a wonderful book that Dr. Seuss wrote. I mean this is their story. This is the India team’s story. We had a woman there, Nageena. We have a whole team of people there that are passionate about talent, passionate about talent acquisition and they came up with this incredibly creative idea.

Now, you know, we’re celebrating it. We’re speaking about it. We’re leveraging it. Now, we’re not going to create to be Indra’s advisors in every country.

We’re realistic that that’s the one place we’re doing it and it’s a great idea and they’re going to own it and win with it, but it just goes to show you that not everything comes from corporate. Not everything is center led. We have to be flexible. You have to listen to what’s happening in the local market and then you have to support them and leverage what they’re doing and scale it. Help them scale it.

Peter: When you talked about college recruiting and I thought it was really interesting. You showed one slide where it was like all of your brands together…

Paul: Yes, the possibilities booth.

Peter: …and yeah, the possibilities booth and a couple of years ago, you go to a college recruiting function and there will be Frito Lay booth…

Paul: Table, yeah sure.

Peter: Yeah. So how were you able to get everyone on board and realized it it’s…yeah.

Paul: We still are Peter. I mean there are groups still today that kind of off on their own and kind of doing their own thing. Again, not…you know what’s amazing about our company and our culture is that the intentions are never negative or they’re trying to do something bad or trying to hurt you. Intentions are always positive. It’s execution that’s sometimes is not being thought through that’s not leveraging and so this goes back to our CEO and her strategic comparatives.

PepsiCo is power of one and where it makes sense we should come together as power of one. That’s an example we should come together as power of one. Now going back to the China example, they don’t go to campuses China foods and China beverages. We sell China foods, snacks, Frito Lay, Quaker products. We sell beverages, Gatorade, Pepsi but they have already recognized that in this country and this massive employment market where they need to be clear about who they are and what they do, there goes PepsiCo China.

And that’s the sort of challenge we are facing in the US and the US was a little bit more historical in nature. Frito Lay was a company that merged with PepsiCo and Pepsi Cola in 1965. Quaker Oats was purchased as I said earlier in 2000 and the legacy and the history which are all gray and we’re proud of it got in the way of execution and got in the way of coming together as one, and we really didn’t integrate these companies when we first spot them but now we’re realizing it’s very important to tell a story in a particular consumer’s base about one PepsiCo.

It’s no different than what we’re trying to do with the investor community. So Peter, we get this all the time. When we do news releases or when we do quarterly earnings, they tend to either say PepsiCo or Pepsi, and they want to frame it up of Pepsi versus Coca Cola, which is definitely one of our competitors, but that’s not the only competitor because we compete with Sara Lee, and we compete with Kraft, and we compete with some of Procter & Gamble’s business and with Dannon.

In the campus recruiting space, the challenges are the same. We need to communicate to the candidate community or the students and the school’s placement offices that we’re PepsiCo and here’s who we are and this is what we’re about and we’re about this scale, about this breadth, and we’re about this business.

Now that doesn’t mean that when you join you don’t start out as a marketer on Ruffles in Plano, Texas.

Peter: Right.

Paul: That’s your first position in a hopefully long career in marketing and then maybe after that you do a position in the field or then after that you move to New York and you do position on our joint venture with Starbucks and work on frappuccino. That gets back to the possibilities, they become sort of endless. But we needed to convince the business that this is okay, that this was the right thing to do and we started functionally.

Tell the marketing team, tell the R&D team, tell the finance team, tell the sales team why going to Darden or going to SMU or wherever the campus was where we go as three or four separate companies, why it’s not an effective recruiting method. Why it’s not with the consumer or candidate wants to hear. They don’t want to hear three different stories. Then you don’t look organized. Then you don’t look strategic. Then you don’t look like your one family. It’s okay to tell the stories of the siblings; we’ve got to talk about the parents.

Peter: Yeah and speaking about your competitors, when you get in to talent acquisition it’s much broader.

Paul: It’s much broader. Yeah, I have to tell people that all the time and historically going back 10, 15 or 20 years, we were more of like targeting just CPG companies

Peter: Right.

Paul: But we’ve had great success and we’ve had great focus at looking beyond CPG. So for example in the pharmaceutical industry, they have a lot of over the counter consumer based products.

In the manufacturing industry beyond food manufacturing, other types of manufacturing. In the entertainment industry. In the retailing industry, we’ve had great success hiring people from what would not be typically thought of as our competitor.

The point is, is that great talent sits in many different industries, and if they’ve got high learning agility and if they’ve got great passion and they’ve got the ability to seize the day and see the possibilities, I mean it goes into the insights of what the cultures like then they might be great for us just like they’re great at XYZ other company and we don’t target a specific company, but I think what we’ve done is busted out the idea that we just compete against CPG and I think that’s an important change for us.

I spent time in the financial service industry and that industry tends to want or recruit specifically just from financial services and while that works and that make sense, what you do find is a little bit of the sort of résumé of people that are all financial service orientated from one firm to another firm and they’re a little myopic and they’re a little just sort of kind of head down focused on their one space, and I welcome the idea of bringing people from other industries.

Peter: There’s a really fascinating profile of PepsiCo in a recent New Yorker, and a couple of the things that it brought up is you are really transforming your brand and your company and how people perceive you with much more healthy foods, for one thing.

Paul: Yes.

Peter: Very much into sustainability and the greens kinds of things.

Paul: Yes.

Peter: Tell us a little about that and how that works into your recruiting.

Paul: Yeah, we’re fortunate. I mean honestly, Peter, I can say I have one of the best jobs there are because #1, we got an amazing CEO and when you have an amazing CEO who has a wonderful vision and wonderful strategy who rallies the organization, who has a deep history with the company. You’re blessed and she and others kind of created this vision of something we call internally and now externally performs with purpose.

It’s on our corporate website. It’s what we talk to investors about. It’s what we talk to customers about and quite frankly it’s now what we’re talking to consumers about and which is we’re still a performance-oriented company. We still seek growth. We still look for double digits on our annualized basis in terms of revenue and margin, but we’re doing it with purpose and the purpose planks are environment, nourishment and talent.

In the environment space, people are shock when they hear some of the things that we do and we’re doing a better job of communicating it. For example, we do have the largest fleet of trucks outside the UPS that go up and down the streets in the United States every single day and we have an initiative that were sponsored by PepsiCo partnering with the industry and partnering with key government leaders and recently got recognition by President Obama which is around trucks that are green. Whether they are electric or they are certain hybrid type of concept, we got those. We’re on our Frito Lay business.

We got plants in both Pepsi and Quaker and Tropicana and Frito Lay. There are being certified lead that is taking energy from the sun or we’re using water and putting all that stuff that were taken out and back in.

On the nourishment side, we got you know as you saw in the presentation, we got a wonderful leader and Dr. Mahmood Khan who’s a scientist at nature, at heart and his passion and he’s got his entire R&D and innovation function. Really looking at the better for you and good for you kind of approaches. Baking versus frying. Taking out things that aren’t necessarily good for you. Decreasing salt but not sacrificing on taste, which requires tremendous amount of technology and advancement.

And on the talent side, you heard so much today of what we’ve been doing but we’ve also been proud of our diversity inclusions. The three planks and the whole performance piece is a wonderful thing for us to kind of what I call ladder down from and we laddered down from that in the possibilities and in the possibilities of branding, we talk about those stories.

We have a video of a gentleman by the name of Christian White on our career site and he talks about taking a plant in Arizona green for Frito Lay. We have a video of a gentleman who’s worked in our Naked Juice business in the UK and now is taking snacks to Asia and thinking about healthy for you snacking in that part of the world. We have an opportunity to sort of spotlight and showcase that wonderful strategy and those wonderful planks as a really compelling story for people to want to join. People want to succeed. They want to do great. They want to be better than they were yesterday, but now there’s this overarching kind of thing of people wanting to do it for a company that’s doing good and we feel like we’ve been about that for a long time and that story is now coming out very clearly.

Peter: You know a lot of your job applicants are also your customers.

Paul: Sure. We call them consumers.

Peter: Consumers.

Paul: Because our customers Wal-Mart or Target; the same thing.

Peter: The consumers are very important to your brand…

Paul: Yes.

Peter: …and as we all know in the application process, the black hole that’s talking about all the time.

Paul: Yes.

Peter: Somebody applies for a particular job…

Paul: And hear nothing.

Peter: And hears nothing so what are you doing to mitigate that?

Paul: So we are going…we’re in the midst, we’ve launched live in the US and Canada and we’re going global as we speak for a single sort of solution for our candidate experience with an applicant tracking system all around the world. The project is called “Hire 2 Onboard” (H2O) and we’re hoping that that will create a better and more rich experience.

We’re also trying to talk to the candidate as part of our engagement process in a more two-way dialogue versus a one-way dialogue. Certainly responsive in things like emails but also Twitter, LinkedIn and other kinds of forums.

Obviously when a candidate comes in to see us, the experience that we want them to have is positive. We want them to have feedback that happens in a very timely manner where they will know where they stand in the process. When we make an offer, we want the offer to be compelling. We want to listen to what their wants and needs are and be flexible that doesn’t always being paying the best. You can’t do necessarily the best for everything but you listen to their wants and their needs and if some person says to us, look the base is great; I’m happy with the sign on but I have an issue with my child or an issue with my spouse, we’ll listen, we’ll respond, we’ll try to be sensitive and we try to have a very high close rate obviously, but we know that not every person gets an interview.

We know that every person’s résumé does not get responded to. We know that every candidate does not necessarily who comes in you know get the offer and so what we try to do as a team is try to remember. Keep it very close to the front of our minds and remember that these are consumers.

These are people who either are currently buying, using, tasting, experiencing our products can refer people to our products, or quite frankly, aren’t using our products and because they go through the process, they learn about us.

We hear those stories every day. I mean not a lot of people know that PepsiCo makes Naked Juice. It’s very healthy for you product, California-based company that we purchased a couple of years ago. Not a lot of people know we make Stacy’s Pita Chip or have a joint venture with Sabra Dipping to make a hummus product. When they learn that, their eyes widen and they smile because they say, “Oh I love that” because maybe they’re not a consumer of our carbonated soft drink portfolio; maybe they’re more of a water drinker or a Gatorade drinker through athletic situations.

So we have to kind of keep that in the front of our mind, Peter, that these are consumers and we certainly don’t want to lose share. Lose share is bad, right?

Peter: Right.

Paul: We want to gain share but we want to gain share authentically and we have a role in that in the recruitment process. So it’s the best we can do to increase awareness of our brands, increase awareness of our performance with progress messaging and to treat those people with respect as we would want to be treated. We try.

We don’t win every day, Peter, but there are certainly people I’m sure that don’t get that experience and they’re disappointed but we try hard, and we know that we can be talking to a candidate about a role and then at night that candidate goes home and she’s a mommy blogger, and she blogs about us and says “Hey not only do I think that their product Quaker Oats is great and I have it every morning with my kids but I just actually interviewed from the company. I didn’t get the job but what a great experience. What a great company” and we want that to happen.

Peter: Paul, thank you so much for taking time to speak with us here on TotalPicture Radio.

Paul: Thank you. We finally met.

Peter: Yes thanks.

Paul: I’m glad we got together.

Peter: Thanks a lot.

We’ve been speaking with Paul Marchand, the VP of global talent acquisition at PepsiCo. Our interview with Paul was recorded at the HCI Strategic talent acquisition Conference in New York.

We welcome your comments on our interview today. You’ll find this podcast in the inside recruiting talent acquisition channel of TotalPicture Radio, that’s totalpicture.com. While there, please sign up for our newsletter and remember, you can subscribe to our program on iTunes. Just do a keyword search for TotalPicture Radio and join me on Twitter @PeterClayton.

Our interviews can link your company with your clients, prospects, employees, and passive candidates. Contact us for sponsorship opportunities at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Thank you for tuning in to TotalPicture Radio, the voice of career and leadership acceleration.