5 Key Arguments Why HR Manager Needs Marketing.

Creating Strategic HR

The use of segmentation and free data access, provided by social media, is the foundation of strategic HR. Long gone are the days when it was enough to put a recruitment ad in a newspaper.

A strategic HR manager understands that the way the company is marketed has a strong effect on recruitment and corporate culture. Thus, they employ marketing tools to make the company attractive for the new talent, as well as to increase participation and engagement of the existing employees.

However, there’s more to the connection between HR and marketing. Let’s take a closer look at 5 key arguments why HR managers need marketing.

1. Building Employer Brand Together

The first argument for the importance of HR-Marketing collaboration is developing and supporting your company’s employer brand.

Your employer brand represents how your company is perceived as an employer. The importance of employer brand cannot be underestimated. According to the statistics, put together by LinkedIn,

• 72% of companies worldwide have agreed that employer brand has a significant effect on recruitment
• 55% of respondents claim to have a proactive employer brand strategy
• 59% of employers worldwide claim to be ready to invest more in employer brand

When it comes to staff management, investing in employer brand has a significant impact on the HR-related indexes:

• Investing in employer brand results in a 28% reduction in the organization’s turnover
• Having a great employer brand results in 50% cost-per-hire reduction
• Developing an employer brand also helps speed up recruitment time

According to LinkedIn, for many companies these numbers can equate in millions of dollars in savings, thus underlining the importance of HR and Marketing teams working together to create a strong employer brand.

When it comes to the importance of marketing for HR, it is also worth mentioning that the employer brand can be viewed from different perspectives:

1) Internal perspective – what your employees think about your company as an employer. An annual review can give you an idea of what your impact is as an employer. This is a job for HR only.

2) External view – how your company is represented directly impacts how potential employees will perceive you as an employer. This is where marketing enters the game.

Both perspectives are important when creating an employer brand. However, without your company being positively represented on various media channels, your employer brand will start to weaken. Thus, this is the first argument to employ marketing – to create a strong employer brand.

2. Attracting Top Talent

Today, the most experienced employees don’t choose their next employer by reading through the newspaper ads. Thus, recruitment has become more complicated in terms of promoting a job position and ensuring that it attracts top talent.

How can the knowledge of marketing help HR managers here?

For promotional purposes, some social media platforms have created tools for companies to help them announce available job positions. For instance, on the Facebook business page you can create a separate section with available job offers, with the options of sharing and embedding content.

• Job description on Facebook allows you to use 5000 characters. You need to use them all. Top talent employees are looking for job descriptions that give as much detail as possible about the company and the job position. Make it more specific by using bullet points and sectioned text.
• Job title, location, job type, and job description are necessary to fill out. However, there are several optional sections, like application questions, that can increase your chances of hiring top talent employees. You can ask a Yes/No question, multiple-choice question or a free-text question to seek out the most qualified candidates.
• You can turn your job posting into a Facebook ad. Facebook ads allow you to select a particular audience that this ad will be visible to. This is also a good strategy to increase your chances of attracting top talent.

Sit down with your marketing team to work together on job descriptions. They should be eye-catching, concise and, most importantly, proofread. With the help of online tools like WOW Grade or Supreme Dissertations, you can create professional-looking job descriptions in no time.

3. Marketing and Corporate Culture

HR managers know how important corporate culture is. Corporate culture isn’t something that just impacts how a company functions from the inside. It carries the company’s values that impact marketing decisions and, hence, the company’s employer brand.

According to CultureIQ, apart from the increase in revenue and stock jumps, a strong corporate culture also ensures:

• Competitive advantage (with 82% of respondents supporting this claim)
• Successful recruiting (with 74% of surveyed HR professionals supporting this claim)
• Hiring the right people and bringing in more diverse candidates (with 55% and 32% of HR professionals agreeing on this respectively)

Marketing campaigns often use corporate values to promote a company. HR teams can benefit from that as well when it comes to creating the right company image for better recruitment. When used correctly in marketing, corporate culture can bring tangible results to HR managers.

4. Making HR More Relatable

Marketing strategies can help HR become more relatable and accessible both to potential candidates and your company’s employees. HR and Marketing do not only collaborate on improving recruitment and attracting top talent. Another important task is keeping existing employees engaged, which, in its turn, has an impact on recruitment as well.

Marketing and HR teams should work together on creating content that employees would want to share. This impacts the company’s visibility and strengthens your employer brand.

Social media marketing has created a trend, where companies share the behind-the-scenes of different events. This positively impacts the company’s general image, and, consequently, your company’s employer brand. This is another reason why marketing can be helpful for HR, making it more relatable and bringing HR activities closer to potential candidates.

5. Marketing the Employee-Centric Workplace

The last reason why marketing can be helpful for HR is to create an image of an employee-centric workplace. “Among the 5 C’s of a successful corporate culture, the employee-centric workplace occupies is on top”, says Paul Klug, an HR manager at Studicus.

The image of an employee-centric workplace can be used for both marketing and HR purposes. And an inspiring example of HR and Marketing teams developing a perfect image of an employee-centric workplace is Marriott.

On its Instagram page Marriott Careers, the company tells the stories of their employees, also sharing which corporate education events they organize for their staff. Thus they both promote the company and HR-related activities through the lens of the employee-centric workplace.

The image of an employee-centric workplace can be successfully used for marketing campaigns as well. This is another factor that impacts the strength of your employer brand, underlining the importance of using marketing for HR.

In Conclusion

HR and marketing should work together on building a mutually beneficial relationship that will bring a lot of advantages for both of these teams. Developing your company’s employer brand, incorporating corporate culture for recruitment purposes, and attracting top talent are the tasks that HR simply cannot do without engaging marketing into the process. Marketing is important for strategic HR, which has the task of achieving a competitive advantage in the labor market.

We inspire all HR managers to employ marketing strategies for their benefit. With marketing tools at hand, you’ll be able to achieve your goals successfully, bringing in new talents as well as increasing the job satisfaction of your employees.”