Why Marketing & HR should date

Marketing and HR — opposites attract? Actually, the two disciplines have a lot in common. Both are oriented around creating a brand, influencing people to take action, and managing relationships. In my experience managing both functions for growing companies, I’ve learned that marketing and HR should work closely together, if not date (assuming that’s okay with company policy). I see this happening with bigger companies in a nascent field called employment branding. For smaller companies that don’t have the luxury of dedicated employment branding, the progressive ones start their brand foundation with their employees. Each functional area benefits from this relationship: marketing gets to count employees as brand ambassadors, and HR participates in the forming of the company’s brand identity.

Here are several ways that marketing & HR blend together.

Values (brand foundation)

A company’s employees drive its culture, and its culture drives its brand. I often hear of a company rolling out a new set of values that are obvious (like “integrity”), and that don’t take into account employee input. Your values already exist; they’re present in the employees you’ve chosen to hire and how those employees choose to work together. It’s your job to tease them out, not invent them (unless you’re the founder and haven’t hired any one yet — then invent away!) Make sure they’re unique, formalize them, then put them into action. This is the foundation for your brand development.

Employment Branding (marketing communications)

What do your job postings say about your company? Ideally, they should be consistent with all of your marketing communications. A friend recently sent me a job spec from a bank with these scintillating responsibilities:

• Representing EIT in the build out and coordination of effective future state architecture governance inclusive of leading tech impact analysis.
• Partner effectively across tech delivery channels of EDA, EIT and the LOB to improve common tech delivery processes that improve our ability to effectively delivery solutions in support of Marketing future state capabilities.

They’re definitely not bringing sexy back. If your brand stands for dull, overly-acronymed company jargon, then this is spot-on. If not, who the heck is writing this? Job descriptions are advertisements for a product — that product being the job. Make sure they will attract the types of candidates you want. How? By asking for input from people who embody the qualities in candidates you want. That’s called identifying your target audience and crafting your communications to appeal to them — in other words, marketing. While you’re at it, double check that your job descriptions are not inadvertently discriminating against a particular group. I find many job descriptions make it clear they’re seeking a young male. More on that at this post.

Who says job descriptions have to be boring recitals of responsibilities and qualifications? I recently saw a CEO posting from a recruiting firm that featured a video from the founders welcoming their new CEO applicants. Now that’s a way to take HR and give it a marketing spin.

Recruiting (product/market fit)

The first place to start putting your values into action is in your recruiting and hiring practices. How do you evaluate whether a candidate will be a good cultural fit? By whether you’d want to hang out with them after work? By whether they look like you? This is a slippery slope to head down. The better way is to dig a bit and find out if their past work experience lives up to your company’s values. Develop a set of interview questions that evaluate whether an employee shares your company’s values. If an interviewer decides an employee is not a cultural fit, ask him/her to document which value the candidate doesn’t embody. This simple approach can work wonders, if the values are unique and true, and the interviewers are trained properly. Wait, you’re just sending people to interviews without training them? We need to talk.

Candidate Experience (CRM)

So now that your recruiting process is ironed out, and you’re creating job descriptions that are marketing-oriented, it’s time to take a look at the overall candidate experience. Each interaction is akin to a social media post — it’s a communication from your brand to your prospects. Don’t forget that candidates can be customers too. To this day, I won’t buy a Coach product because I didn’t like the way I was treated during interviews when I was at business school. Petty, probably (plus I’m cheap and like vintage stuff). But if every candidate walks away with a bad experience, the impact on your brand can be substantial.

How many applicants never hear back from your company? It’s the black hole of employment branding. A well-crafted rejection note can leave a positive impression. If this is too hard to manage for hundreds of applicants (and I get it, it’s a lot), then create a communications strategy and enforce it. Mine is to respond with a thoughtful, kind rejection note IF the candidate wrote a thoughtful cover letter. That’s the least we can do. I have many people in my network whom I consider friends, future colleagues and future business partners whom I met after interviewing and declining to hire them. Handled gracefully, a gentle rejection can be the start of a fruitful relationship.

Internal Communications (the love-child of PR & HR)

Companies spend a lot of time and effort managing their public relations externally, but only recently has internal communications become a priority at larger companies. I’ve found the best way to motivate people is to align them around a common vision and ensure they understand how their role ties into that vision. This is where internal communications comes in.

Are you sharing information consistently and effectively with all your team members? Probably not, because to do so requires repeating yourself constantly and most of us don’t like that. If your company has the luxury of hiring an internal communications person full time, go for it! If not, find an excellent people person on your staff and ask him/her to lend a hand. Or an ear. Good communication is just as much listening as speaking — maybe more. An easy short cut, if you’re not quite ready to dedicate staff time to this, is to make sure that all marketing plans include employees as the first audience to address.

So, now that HR & marketing are ready for a first date, we can do some relationship counseling in a future post. I hope that this has inspired you to consider hiring or promoting a marketing-oriented HR person, or an HR/talent-oriented marketing person.

I’m available to help, so feel free to reach out.