Are HR and Marketing the Next Epic Love Story? Part III: The Benefits of Marketing

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In the last post, we discovered how having a digital presence can strengthen your employer brand and help attract potential employees. This week, we will delve into the ways marketing can help HR in this new mission.

What exactly do marketers do?

To put it in the simplest terms, marketers create awareness of your brand and a drive desired action from the group of people you are trying to reach. Marketers do extensive research, develop strategies, and employ tactics in order to accomplish these goals. While some of these aspects can be handled by a singular person, there is often a group of people that work together to turn each element into a cohesive strategy-based campaign. This is very similar to how HR functions in terms of different people handling different aspects that all fall under the same organizational goals.

How can marketers help HR?

Marketers can help HR immensely when it comes to the arts of employer branding and talent acquisition. Traditional branding as an intangible idea is based on the work and strategies from marketing. Yes, companies can have an amazing product or service and survive off of those things alone. However, if they want to not only survive, but thrive, they should have some form of marketing, and the branding that comes from marketing, in place. Just think about almost any company that you are familiar with. Do you know why that company came to mind? You guessed it: Marketing.

Marketers can bring the acquired knowledge from crafting –and maintaining; traditional branding to the task of creating a strong employer brand. While the many details of how a digital presence should be built and handled thereafter could be daunting to many HR professionals, these would be second-nature for a seasoned marketer.

In a previous interview, Sebastien Girard, VP of Talent Acquisition for Parkland Health and Hospital System illustrated the bond that is forming between marketing and HR when he said, “There are even some companies that have talent acquisition not reporting to HR anymore, but instead, a standalone department or reporting to marketing. Talent acquisition is becoming less about “post and pray” and more about building employer brand awareness.”

Target the right talent with marketing strategy.

For talent acquisition, take a moment to think about what this really entails. Yes, it entails writing a killer job description. Yes, it also entails deciding who you want to apply for the job. It also entails figuring out how to best reach those people that you want to apply. This is where marketing comes in. Before, crafting strategies and tactics for the latest marketing campaign, marketers have to decipher who the target audience actually is. Part of this is discovering what matters to members of that audience, finding the right messages to send to them, and where they will most likely go to find that message.

Let’s say that you are trying to attract a part-time representative for a call center. This position is considered entry-level and would not provide more than 20 hours per week.

A marketer would look at this position and think to themselves, “Who would be the right target for this position?” With this frame of mind and a bit of market research for your area, the answer would likely pop up as college students. From this, it could be determined that the way to communicate the benefits of this position would be something like:

“Our company is seeking a part-time representative for call center operations. This is a great position for college students! We offer flexible scheduling of work shifts that do not exceed 20 hours per week. During call downtime, there is an opportunity to do homework activities. This position provides experience in X, Y, and Z with opportunity for movement into other areas upon completion of education.”

In this example, all of these benefits that have been communicated are things that college students may worry about when thinking of adding a job to their already full schedule. Then a marketer would think about where college students would look to find jobs. In this case, college internship boards, school newspapers, and other such places would be the best bets for getting this posting in front of potential candidates.

Once potential pain points are alleviated and the position is posted in the right place, the desired candidates will apply.

This is nothing new to marketers. If a close relationship with HR is formed, part of the biggest battles in the war for talent can easily be won.

Are HR and Marketing the Next Epic Love Story? Part II: Digital Presence

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In the last post, we started to look at how HR and marketing begin to mix for the purpose of employer branding. This week we will take a further look at the relationship forging between these two industries.

Employer branding is the way that your organization is perceived by both current and potential employees.

Because of this, you want to make sure that your brand is recognized as being positive.  It is likely that there will inevitably be some unavoidable and seemingly negative aspects of your brand at some point or another. Having a strong employer brand allows you to overcome these moments that could otherwise be destructive to your efforts to attract and retain the best employees.

There are many pieces of your organization’s employer brand.

As mentioned in the last post, a few of these have already been covered in recent weeks.

Creating a positive employer brand requires:

• Your current employees to be engaged and happy to work for your organization
• Your job descriptions exciting potential employees about working for you
• Providing a great candidate experience – even if the candidate is not a fit for your organization.

Now that we have that part out of the way, we can move on to other parts of creating a solid employer brand.

Everyone is online.

Well, pretty much everyone is anyway. It is more important than ever that your organization not only has a strong online presence for its traditional brand but that it also has a strong online presence for its employer brand.

I can almost guarantee that any candidate worth their salt will check out your website, your social media platforms and even employer review sites when considering working for your organization. 

If your website looks like it’s from the 1980s, candidates will likely assume that your organization isn’t up to date on the things that make working for a company engaging. Some of these assumptions may include:

• Out of date technology– no one, not even front line workers, want to deal with a broken system or software that should have been put of its misery years ago on a day to day basis.
• Archaic leadership styles –If you can’t be bothered to bring your website into the modern era, you most likely haven’t brought your leadership up either. No one wants to spend most of their waking lives with tyrannical leaders.

If a candidate is considering working for your organization, they will check you out on social media. A lack of regularly updated social accounts leaves potential candidates with the impression that:

1. Your organization has nothing going on – You must not have anything good going on if you are not sharing any news about new products or services, company growth, or the latest employee outings and accomplishments.
2. Things are not going well– If they were, wouldn’t your organization want to share how great it’s doing? Even though people often say “no news, is good news”, that generally doesn’t apply to organizations that are doing well.
3. Like above, your organization is out–of-touch with the new working world – A complete lack of social media presence shows that your organization doesn’t realize that it’s 2016 and can give the same impressions as an out-of-date website.

It is also important that your organization has a social media presence specifically dedicated to its career opportunities.

This is the perfect place to show the world of job seekers how great it is to work at your organization. Here you can showcase:

• Great Employees- Did you just award someone with the title of employee of the week, month, quarter, or year? Share it! Potential candidates would love to see that current employees are recognized.
• Employee Perks – Do you buy your employees lunch every Friday? Or take them out for an occasional day of fun? Share that too. Candidates want to be able to see that your organization not only takes its goals seriously but that it takes fun seriously too.
• Current Openings – Aside from inundated job boards, this is one of the best places to promote currently available positions. Openings posted here, paired with some of the great types of posts above, allow candidates to see more than the ‘About us’ section on a job posting.

Now that there are employer reviews available on sites such as Glassdoor, Indeed, and other posting boards, it is important that you treat your current employees well.

No matter how great your website and social media accounts are, if an employer review paints your company in a negative light, it may be hard to attract great candidates. Unfortunately for companies, but fortunately for candidates, there is very little that a company can do to remove negative reviews about it on these types of sites. Because of this, it is more important than ever to make sure that your employees are actively engaged, recognized for their contributions, and fairly paid. If you forgo these things, your employer review scores will suffer dramatically and candidates may shy away from applying for your openings.

In the next post, we will look at how marketing can help in building your digital presence to attract the best candidates.

 

Want to Attract Top-Level Talent? Write Like a Marketer.

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Last week, we looked at some of the ways that online applications – and the subsequent lack of follow up, can hurt your recruiting efforts. This week, we will look at using a marketing approach to posting job descriptions that attract rock star talent.

When posting a job online, do you think about who might read it?

Of course, you do. If you don’t, then you really may need to take some time to evaluate why you are posting openings at all.

Before you post, you sit down and answer all of those questions I mentioned last week; the ‘who, what, where, why, and when’ of the position. When you have formulated all of the possible answers to these questions, you, or the hiring manager, work up a neatly summarized description with a few bullet points here and there.  Then you post it on LinkedIn, Indeed or whatever job board you decide to use, and then you wait. Applications come flooding in and you may begin to notice that many of the candidates do not seem to fill the ‘rock star’ ideal you had envisioned.  Dejected, you take a second look at the posting and begin to notice that the written details of the job you posted aren’t necessarily geared to interest the types of candidates you are actually looking for.  Before you revise the description and post it again, after taking a moment to send an automated ‘we went another direction’ message to those applicants who did not come close to fitting the criteria, take a second to ask yourself, ‘What would a marketer do?’

In marketing and advertising, those who create written information with the goal of obtaining an action from the reader, have to carefully consider the information presented and how the reader will receive it. When I say ‘receive’ I do not mean whether the information shows up in their inbox or in their physical mailbox. I mean the way that the reader will internalize the information upon reading it.

Would you apply for the job you posted?

Put yourself in the rock star candidate’s shoes and read your post. Did your description include a bunch of ‘position will require Microsoft Word skills, proper understanding of the English language, ability to breathe without being reminded’ statements? Did you mean to say, ‘We are looking for a highly skilled candidate that will engage our current and potential customers by using strategy to create informative communications’? The latter statement is far more likely to attract the type of candidates that you are looking for.

You MUST think about who you are trying to reach with your post.

If you’re trying to reach an entry-level candidate with little to no formal education, that will receive constant supervision, then the first description might suffice. If you want an innovative rock star that will launch the organization with occasional guidance, then the second description is a far better choice. Talented people want to be able to envision themselves positively in potential roles. The first description gives the vision of sitting in an office; staring at a computer and having your boss stare over your shoulder and telling you what to click next. While some people may want that, those are not the candidates that will make a difference for your company.

Flaunt pain points and benefits to the employee for solving them.

Attracting highly skilled employees requires a fantastic job description that accurately describes your pain points for the potential employee to solve. Another important aspect of the job description should illustrate how you will solve an employee’s pain points too. Employee pain points can include financial stability, a need for health insurance, and an environment that fosters continuous learning. Make sure that your post addresses these things. Many highly skilled candidates won’t even bother applying to a job that doesn’t list a pay range since they see this as their time being potentially wasted with an offer much lower than expected.  Some may not apply because you don’t list that you offer the awesome benefits packages that you have.  Candidates want a mutually beneficial relationship with their employers. They don’t want to just hear about what they can do for your company. They also want to know what your company can do for them.

In his previously mentioned interview, Sebastien Girard, Vice President of Talent Acquisition and Workforce Planning for Parkland Health and Hospital System, agreed, “Candidates want to make sure that you understand what they need. We are in an employee market now, not an employer market. Having that trend changing from what it was even just five years ago, it’s more of a ‘what’s in it for them’ versus ‘what’s in it for the company’ approach.”

When you take the time and effort to think about whom you are trying to entice when creating a job posting, you will attract the right candidates.

After all, why wouldn’t you put time and effort into the job description? Think about how much time and effort it would take to post the wrong type of job description, go through the interview process, realize that you didn’t attract the right person for the job and have to start at square one.

Happy posting!