When I was early in my marketing career, the human resources (HR) team came to me asking for help to promote our careers page. I dismissed it, saying something along the line of, “My job is to drive leads and bring in business, not promote job vacancies.”
Needless to say, my limited view of marketing’s role wouldn’t fly today. The “war for talent” is raging fiercer than ever, with the lowest unemployment rate in decades, staffing shortages for many highly coveted skills and an environment where top talent chooses their employer -- not the other way around.
Organizations can’t execute their business strategies if they don’t have the right job roles filled -- how do you expect to tackle the next great opportunity if you don’t have the people to do the tackling? This means that they need to be consistently attracting, empowering, inspiring and retaining talent.
Just as organizations compete for customers by differentiating product value, they too must compete for talent by differentiating the employee experience. A critical piece of this differentiation is employer brand -- your organization’s story, the message communicated about its reason for existing, its purpose and what it aspires to be. Employer brand helps bring a company’s culture to life.
Employer brand is so critical that it can’t just fall on the HR department’s shoulders; marketing must play an active role in partnership with HR and talent acquisition.
My company, the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), recently conducted a survey of more than 540 professionals, published in a report titled “Reimagining Talent Acquisition: Mastering Employer Brand.” We found that, while collaboration between HR and marketing to review employer brand strategy and execution is happening in fewer than one-third (27%) of companies, high-performance organizations are six-times more likely to have this partnership in place. They are also 1.5-times more likely to share joint responsibility for building and communicating the employer brand.
So, what does a partnership between HR and marketing look like? Here are five ways the two functions can work together:
1. Create a multimedia and multichannel strategy. HR knows talent. Marketing knows the channels and methods to get the word out. The two departments should work together to determine the best strategy for reaching candidates.
2. Build personas. Just like marketing should define buyer personas to “bring to life” key characteristics of potential customers, talent acquisition should define personas of key talent they want to attract and recruit. There are clear synergies here, including identifying the right questions to ask, such as “How do we differentiate from the competition?” and “How do we engage talent so that they want to become part of the organization and stay?”
3. Help with storytelling. I believe the most impactful measure of the effectiveness of an employer brand is the ability of employees to communicate the brand. Further, brand messaging should be consistent between employees, talent acquisition and marketing. Marketing must play a central role in managing the message, and it can also help identify and communicate the right stories to tell.
4. Help choose communication channels. There are many ways to communicate your brand story, and who knows these better than marketing? Helping HR and talent acquisition to identify the right channels to reach intended talent pools and with how to use those channels most effectively can go a long way. Further, and especially for business-to-business companies, LinkedIn is a critical channel for engaging with both customers and potential employees; marketing and talent acquisition should be in lockstep with how the LinkedIn company pages are utilized.
5. Measure success. Tracking the success of employer brand initiatives can become an extension of existing marketing analytics. Tracking “best employer” rankings and awards, social media engagements and employees’ ability to communicate the brand to others are all effective ways to measure success. Interestingly, our research revealed just 16% of organizations track Glassdoor ratings, despite a high correlation to both market performance and talent acquisition effectiveness.
Attracting the right talent is just as important as attracting new customers. Establishing a strong employer brand should be a part of any organization’s brand strategy, so the next time HR comes to you for help, it would be wise to listen. Better yet, be proactive and start working together immediately. Your competitive advantage is at stake.
